The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The Prince and the Showgirl

Most of the summer of 1956 would be devoted to filming Marilyn’s next movie, The Prince and the Showgirl, which would star her with Laurence Olivier and be set in London. Marilyn and her new husband, Arthur, would be ensconced in Parkside House, a large manse in Englefield Green. Rehearsals for the movie began on July 18 and continued until August 3. Filming would commence on August 7 and continue through November.

Laurence Olivier’s original connection to the movie was when he appeared on the London stage in the Terence Rattigan play The Sleeping Prince, on which the film was based. Sir Larry starred with his wife, Vivien Leigh, forever remembered as Margaret Mitchell’s beautiful, resourceful heroine Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Set in London in 1911 during the coronation of King George V, the plot has us spend an evening with Grandduke Charles (Olivier), the prince regent of Carpathia, who’s come to town for the royal proceedings to take place the following day. Taking advantage of his one evening off, the grandduke, a notorious womanizer infamous as a seducer of chorus girls for one-night stands, attends a musical at the Coconut Girl theatre and is immediately charmed by a beautiful American understudy, Elsie Mariner (Monroe). He orders his British attaché to invite her to the embassy for a private supper. It plays like a French farce disguised as a Victor Herbert operetta, with neither the sex of the former nor the music of the latter. Elsie is led to believe she’s being invited to a party, not a one-on-one, intimate late-night repast. Foreplay consists of the grand-duke’s attempts to get Elsie sloshed and then in bed. He succeeds in the first and fails in the last. The sub rosa political shenanigans going on behind closed doors, involving the competition between the grandduke’s seventeen-year-old son, Nicolas, the king-in-waiting, and the grandduke, are too complicated to go into. What is important to know is that despite all odds, Elsie and Charles manage to fall in love, but their future plans must be put on hold while Carpathia fights for its survival in the Balkan Wars.

Marilyn’s longtime friend Milton Greene executive produced the film, along with Marilyn. It would be the second project for Marilyn Monroe Productions, following Bus Stop, and would be filmed at Britain’s Pinewood Studios. There was widespread speculation as to how Marilyn’s well-known neurotic behavior—tardiness, absenteeism, ill-preparedness, insecurities—would play against the professionalism and discipline of the classically trained Olivier. Those who predicted the worst got it right. Olivier, as director and leading man, bore the brunt. He reveals in his 1983 autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, that preparatory to beginning production on the movie, he was convinced he was going to fall in love with Marilyn. During the shooting of the picture, he must have wondered where he ever got such a notion. However, he was very enthusiastic about her, admitting she was “wonderful in the film, the best thing in it,” her performance overshadowing his own and the final result worth the aggravation. (This is essentially what Billy Wilder said after his experience with Marilyn in Some Like It Hot.) Olivier goes on to say, “There are two entirely different sides [to Marilyn]. You would not be far out if you described her as a schizoid, the two people that she was could hardly have been more different. She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined, apart from herself on the screen.” Of her acting, Olivier called her “a professional amateur.”

Also interestingly, regarding this film, James Haspiel observes, “[In this film] Marilyn is as close to being her off-screen self as she ever was. That is her real voice. It’s the way she spoke in person. Her hair is the real color of her hair. I think that’s what’s most fascinating about this one movie.”

Mable Whittington, who worked at Parkside House as a maid under the direction of the main housekeeper, Dolly Stiles, recalled of this time, “There was a great excitement about the arrival of the Millers. I remember that someone [Milton Greene] had the walls of the master bedroom painted white in Marilyn’s honor. There was an increase in all security measures. We were all on alert, so to speak. What did I think of them? I thought Mrs. Miller was a bit pampered. She was used to a certain way, let’s just say. Everything had to be just so. I remember she complained about the pillowcases being too starched, but what she required was minor. Too many pills, though. I remember being surprised by the number of bottles on her nightstand. I didn’t know what they were for, exactly—but there were a lot of them. There were always empty bottles of champagne in her room, too. Also, I have to say that she was a bit untidy. She would step out of her clothes and there they would lay on the floor until I or someone else picked up after her. The bathroom was always a sight—makeup everywhere, personal belongings everywhere. I recall that she had a way of transforming herself that was almost magical. She was lovely but not necessarily glamorous in her day-to-day. But at night, if they were to go to a show—which they did often—or if she needed to be dressed for a dinner, she would become an entirely different person. It wasn’t just the makeup and beautiful gowns and gloves and furs, though they were a big part of it. It was the attitude. When she dressed like Marilyn Monroe she acted like Marilyn Monroe. The star quality was there, I guess—in the Marilyn persona. Her personality as Marilyn Monroe was entirely different than as… I don’t know… the real her, maybe.

“Arthur Miller? I found him to be insufferable. He didn’t want to speak to the help and, in fact, would get angry if we even looked at him. He would say, ‘Must you look at me?’ I recall that two household employees were approached to give secrets about the Millers to the press. When he found out about it, he became raving mad. ‘I demand that they be fired,’ he kept saying. Of course that was to be the case, anyway—though I don’t recall that they actually sold their stories. Marilyn wasn’t very upset about that turn of events. I recall that she said, ‘What else is new?’

“As a couple, they seemed happy at the start but as the months wore on, less so. He was constantly nagging her about one thing or another, usually how he felt she should prepare for the day’s work. I remember that there were a lot of press conferences during their stay and that, afterward, he would tell her that she had answered this or that question in the wrong way. He picked on her a lot. She seemed to really want to know his opinion, though. However, I think that there was a point when she’d had enough of it, especially when he began to criticize her acting when she was practicing from her script. I recall her having trouble memorizing her script. I remember thinking, goodness, for an actress who has made so many movies, I can’t understand how she can’t remember her lines. She would walk around the house trying to remember a simple line, repeating it to herself over and over. I remember that he was annoyed by the way she was trying to memorize something and he kept correcting her. She snapped at him and said, ‘When you begin making pictures, we can discuss this. Until then, let me act, and you just do what you do.’ ”

Possible evidence of marital discord at this time comes from a letter Marilyn sent to Berniece from England. In it, she never once even mentions Arthur Miller, and refers to herself only in the singular, from “I am having a wonderful time,” to “I have been sightseeing,” to “I am staying very busy.”

Also at this time, Marilyn continued to receive letters from her mother, Gladys, even while in England. Gladys seemed somewhat better judging from one she wrote, dated July 25: “I am very unhappy, daughter. I wish there was some way to join you in England where I am sure we would have a lovely time. May God be with you and may He find a way for us to be together again very soon. Love, Mother.” However, a week later, on August 2, she seemed to be not as well: “I have decided that the sooner I am able to leave here the better. I know I am a big topic of discussion here and it’s not because of you, Marilyn. There seems to be a lot of interest in me, as well. Perhaps when I am released I will tell you about it though I doubt you would be interested in anything that has to do with me, your only Mother. Love, Gladys Baker Eley.” It’s not known if Marilyn responded to any of the mail she received from Gladys while in England. However, it is known that she was informed by the sanitarium staff that Gladys had also begun writing letters to J. Edgar Hoover at the Justice Department. This Marilyn found quite disturbing. As soon as she heard about it, she called Inez Melson long distance and asked her to look into the matter. Marilyn certainly didn’t want Gladys giving any information about her to Hoover. In fact, she didn’t like that Hoover knew where Gladys was, and how to communicate with her. Melson quickly reported back to Marilyn that when she asked Gladys what was going on, Gladys told that she was just sending Christian Science literature to Hoover, just as she had also sent some to the president of the United States. She said that she believed Marilyn to be friends of those two government officials and that she felt she could use Marilyn’s name as an entrée to them. She wondered why every time she attempted to reach out to people, her daughter was always “the first one to try to stop me.” She also demanded that Melson tell Marilyn to stop thwarting her attempts to have communication with “the people running our country.” Again, all of this was very disturbing. Gladys didn’t realize that anything she said to someone like Hoover could be used against her daughter somewhere down the line. Marilyn shot off a letter to Melson telling her that any missive sent to any government officials written by her mother should be immediately confiscated by the sanitarium officials and not mailed. She wrote that she didn’t want to censor her mother’s communication, but that she felt she had to “draw a line somewhere, and this is as good a place as any, I think.”

Meanwhile, while Marilyn was dealing with her mother, preproduction negotiations for the film continued. There was one surprise in this regard that, in retrospect, maybe shouldn’t have been so surprising. Lee Strasberg—Marilyn’s new acting guru—demanded that his wife, Paula—Marilyn’s new on-set acting coach—receive what was then a huge amount of money for her work with Monroe: $25,000 a week for ten weeks’ work, plus expenses and double that amount for overtime. This was more than most of the actors were making. Donald Spoto, in his Monroe biography, published a corporate memorandum from Irving Stein, Marilyn’s lawyer, regarding the demand. It said, “Lee doesn’t care that this money would really come from Marilyn’s pocket. Joe [Carr, Marilyn Monroe Productions accountant] and Milton carefully explained the shaky finances, but Lee was adamant. He kept emphasizing Marilyn’s emotional weakness—and then he said he would be willing to settle for a percentage of the picture! He also wanted George Cukor to direct, not Larry. Paula, he said, is more than a coach—therefore he doesn’t care what other coaches get. He absolutely rejects Paula’s Bus Stop salary.”

When Marilyn heard about the demand, she decided to allow some of the money to come from her own salary because, as far as she was concerned, Paula was absolutely necessary on the set at all times. Thus, after all was said and done, Paula Strasberg would be making more than anyone else involved in the picture besides Marilyn and Laurence Olivier! It would seem that Marilyn had replaced one Natasha Lytess with another, especially given Arthur Miller’s feelings about Paula. Like DiMaggio before him, who loathed Natasha, Miller had this to say about Paula: “She was a hoax, but so successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn that she created this tremendous reputation.” He also said she was “poisonous and vacuous.” ^*

Moreover, to Arthur Miller’s great dismay, Marilyn’s psychiatrist—Dr. Hohenberg, who had been sanctioned by Lee Strasberg—somehow ended up involved in the negotiations for The Prince and the Showgirl, and saw to it that Paula received the money that had been demanded by her husband. One wonders how much the doctor may have received in return. Moreover, since when did acting teachers like Lee Strasberg have a say in who directed a movie starring one of their students? Marilyn may have thought she was in charge when she started Marilyn Monroe Productions, but she continued to fall under the sway of domineering colleagues.