The Misfits: The Film That Ended a Marriage

The Misfits (1961) will be screened in the Ted Mann Theatre at the Academy Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles this Saturday, December 3 at 7 pm, in a North American premiere for the 4K restoration completed from the original 35 mm negative in 2018. The film’s initial release was eclipsed by the death of leading man Clark Gable, and would also prove to be Marilyn’s cinematic swansong – but it’s now considered a minor classic, bridging the gap between Hollywood’s golden age and the 1960s New Wave. The Misfits is followed at 9 pm by another hidden gem of film preservation, Call It Murder (1934). Source: themarilynreport.com

Even though the Monroe/Miller marriage was in crisis, Marilyn was surrounded by people she liked and got on with – Gable, Clift, Wallach and Ritter, a special friend of hers from the Actors Studio. She also had her masseur Ralph Roberts, her press secretary May Reis, her makeup man Allan “Whitey” Snyder, her stand-in Evelyn Moriarty, her limo driver Rudy Kausky, her publicist Rupert Allan and the two people who did her hair, Sidney Guilaroff and Agnes Flanagan. Reis had worked for Miller in the past. Huston gave Roberts a small part as an ambulance driver in the film. The only person John Huston was concerned about was Paula Strasberg, who replaced Natasha Lytess as Monroe’s acting coach and who threatened to derail any production with her imperiousness. Slowly but surely, Miller’s script had begun to infiltrate her life. Where did one end and the other begin? Nobody knew for sure. He was getting ideas from her daily behavior. Mood changes that depressed both of them enriched his work. Monroe’s demons became Roslyn’s by proxy. Miller didn’t know why she was offended. He thought he was portraying some of her most endearing qualities – “spontaneous joy and sympathy.” 

Lee Strasberg had seen something in Marilyn that most other acting coaches missed. “What was going on inside was not what was going on outside,” he said. “That always means there may be something there to work with.” Of all the stars he'd worked with, he said, Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando were the two who stood out for him. One of the reasons Strasberg took such an interest in Monroe was to rebuild his reputation. It suffered some damage from Brando’s renunciation of him in favor of Stella Adler. Marilyn performed many interesting pieces at the Actors Studio, from Golden Boy to A Streetcar Named Desire to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses. No doubt this was the biggest stretch for her. 

The Hollywood Studio Club, a building near the Paramount Studios that housed hundreds of young hopefuls, had opened in 1926 and it would close definitely its doors in 1975. Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Malone, Kim Novak, Donna Reed, Barbara Hale, Barbara Rush and Sharon Tate had lived in the Hollywood Club for a while (the tops was 3 years). “I heard there was this place for girls in show business who hadn’t made it yet and you got two meals a day for $15 a week,” said Rita Moreno, so she and her friend Louise Martinson moved in. After “playing a lot of Indian maidens,” Moreno signed a contract with Fox. Sparks flashed when Moreno met Brando on the Fox lot. Soon, she was taking his calls on the hallway phone, grabbing her nail polish on the way because, she says, “he was on the phone for hours at a time.” Curled up on the floor with the receiver on her shoulder and the cord stretched as far as it would go, she gave herself a mani-pedi. “All the girls wanted to know what happened on my dates with him, so Louise said, 'Let’s write down your whole experience and read it out loud'.”

One night their bedroom was packed as Rita Moreno recounted accompanying Brando to an Actors Studio party in San Fernando Valley—where she met Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (whose romance was blossoming) and also James Dean. While Dean seemed fixated on Marilyn, and since Brando was busy dancing with Moreno, Marilyn seemed intrigued by Newman, although it was evident that Marilyn was not Newman's type. Actually, Newman was not enthused with the occasional antics of Woodward as glamour queen, that he called "Joanne's fantasy of being like Marilyn Monroe." 

John Huston hated the way Monroe treated Miller while shooting The Misfits. She insulted him in front of others. He’d act like he didn’t care: “He would pretend he wasn’t listening.” Her hangers-on carried on the humiliation: “I think they hoped to demonstrate their loyalty to Marilyn by being impertinent to Arthur. On these occasions Arthur never changed his expression.” In his book Conversations with Marilyn (1976), journalist WJ Weatherby gives voice to Marilyn's intimate thoughts about her failed marriage with Miller: "I had asked why she had yelled at the film crew of The Misfits, in particular a shy, well meaning man who had taken it badly. 'I can be a monster,' she replied seriously. 'Some of my friends want me to be innocent. If they saw the monster in me, they'd probably never talk to me. Sometimes I think that's what happened in my marriage to Arthur. He saw me as so beautiful and innocent between the wolves of Hollywood, I tried to be that person. When the monster showed up, Arthur couldn't believe it. But I felt he knew and loved all of me. I put Arthur through a lot, I know. It would've been easier with a more party-going kind of man. But I want someone different from me. A challenge." 

Monroe always looked out for Clift. When his jeans sagged, she told the makeup people to moisten them so they became tight. Though the overt romantic relationship in the film is between Gable and Monroe, the one between Clift and Monroe is in some ways deeper. Clift patted Monroe’s bottom on the set one day and she was amused. At other times she tantalized him with her body, rubbing her breasts across his nose. It was said that she was “determined to get him into bed for the hell of it,” thinking of his affair with Liz Taylor. Clift tried to make love to her once but they were both too drunk at the time for anything to happen. Instead they just “fooled around.” —The Misfits: The Film That Ended a Marriage (2022) by Aubrey Malone