The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Something’s Got to Give

Marilyn Monroe owed Fox one last picture under her 1956 contract and they wanted it in 1962. That one would be Something’s Got to Give, a moderately budgeted remake of My Favorite Wife, the 1940 screwball classic that starred Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, and Gail Patrick.

At this time, the Fox executives were panicked because the studio was close to bankruptcy due to its losses on Cleopatra, the epic being filmed in Rome. Though Elizabeth Taylor was paid a million dollars to make that film—ten times what Marilyn was making for Something’s Got to Give!—it would suffer numerous delays due to its leading lady’s many different illnesses and missing days on the set. The studio couldn’t afford any more problems on the set of one of its major films. It had already sold off its back lot to finance Cleopatra and it desperately needed the operating capital that a Marilyn Monroe picture would provide. Unfortunately, there was simply no way such an endeavor was going to be smooth sailing. Making a movie with Marilyn was quite often an ordeal under the best of circumstances due to her habitual tardiness. At this time, she was obviously not well at all, emotionally as well as physically.

As it turned out, there have been entire books and DVDs based on the troubled production of Something’s Got to Give, that’s how much of a mess it was from the start. As many as five different writers worked on the script, culminating with Walter Bernstein’s final work, which was anything but stellar. The movie was over budget almost before it even began filming! Making matters even more confounding, Dr. Ralph Greenson found his way into this aspect of Marilyn’s life as well, even if not completely by design. Fox studio head Peter Levathes must have known that his star Marilyn was going to cause all manner of problems on the production considering her condition, so he recruited Greenson as the point man responsible for making sure she showed up on set every day. Apparently, all Greenson needed was an invitation to participate, because before anyone knew what had happened, somehow producer David Brown had ended up being replaced by Greenson’s friend Henry Weinstein—much to director George Cukor’s outrage.

Marilyn had the director of her own choosing, George Cukor, and the leading man of her choice, Dean Martin. She had Jean Louis creating her costumes. Her personal makeup man Whitey Snyder was on hand, as was MGM’s Sydney Guilaroff, who gave her hair a flattering bouffanty flip and a stunning new platinum color. What she didn’t have was the will to fight the demons that would keep her off the set for sixteen of the first seventeen days of filming. She would blame a slew of maladies for her nonappearance: sinusitis, insomnia, virus, loss of voice, physical exhaustion. The studio engaged three doctors to remain on the set daily—an ear, nose, and throat specialist, an internist, and a psychiatrist.

To watch the DVD of the documentary Marilyn: Something’s Got to Give—a comprehensive look at the making of this movie—is difficult, made more so when one considers what Marilyn’s life and career might have been had she not been so bedeviled with self-doubt, insecurities, unhappy relationships, paranoia, despondency, and drug dependency. Remarkably, though, Cukor was able to get a few excellent sequences on film, and Marilyn was—and this is without exaggeration—more beautiful, more appealing… indeed more Marilyn Monroe, than ever. How she always looked so ravishing on film despite the nightmare of her private life remained, until the very end, one of the biggest mysteries about her. In fact, she dropped eighteen pounds before appearing on this set for makeup and costume tests, and as a result her figure was astonishingly young and toned. Of course, she was off her medication, which accounted for some of the weight loss (not to mention some of the problems she had on the set). Her trim figure gave her much more confidence. She was playful, like a little girl, as she posed for the camera in some of the outfits designed for her by Jean Louis. She walked with a new elegance. It’s quite amazing to see. The test footage was included in the documentary mentioned previously. Also included are the scenes Cukor shot. Indeed, for years it was thought that there was nothing left of the film, but in 1982 in a cluttered studio warehouse, eight boxes of raw film were discovered, some of its color faded, but in good enough condition to be useful. Some forty years after Fox fired Marilyn and closed down production, the studio salvaged thirty-seven minutes of film time and included some of it in the documentary, which was shown as a television special.

What also has to be stated about this production is how cooperative Marilyn was on the days that she did show up. Certainly her selection of Cukor as director was one she regretted. She knew he was a good director and respected his work, but she also knew that he didn’t have much regard for her, so in a sense it was very brave of her to hire him. Given that she had approved of Cukor as director of Let’s Make Love two years earlier, one would have to wonder why she would repeat that experience with him. “The mother was mad, and poor Marilyn was mad,” he would later say of her. After she realized she would have a problem with Cukor, she tried to bring in screenplay writer Nunnally Johnson to replace him, but to no avail. “But the girl was neurotic beyond description,” Johnson would recall. “Even if they were nutty enough to let me take George’s place, two weeks later something would happen and she would come to hate me as much as she hated him. Marilyn kept retreating farther and farther from reality.” In the end, Cukor had Marilyn doing the most ridiculous scenes over and over—such as one with a dog that would amount to just a few seconds in the final product. Her time could have been so much better utilized. Even in scenes where she was shot from behind—where her stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, could easily have done the work—Cukor insisted that Marilyn be present and on set to do take after take after take. Never once did she lose her temper, though.

Incidentally, 20th Century-Fox made the aborted film the following year with Doris Day and James Garner filling the Marilyn and Dean roles, and a new name, Move Over, Darling. What’s funny about this finished film is that in scenes where Marilyn was dressed in the finest of cocktail dresses with the most bouffant of hairstyles, Doris is seen in blue jeans with her hair pulled back in an ordinary ponytail—thus the personality differences between two great actresses, Misses Monroe and Day.