Page 66 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

An ambulance arrives to revive her once again.

CHAPTER 45

“I’M DYING TO WORK with you again,” Billy Wilder writes to Marilyn on March 17, 1958. Wilder, who directed Marilyn inThe Seven Year Itch,pitches her on his new project,Some Like It Hot.

Marilyn hasn’t worked on a film since wrappingThe Prince and the Showgirlin November 1956. Work, Arthur Miller believes, will help Marilyn recover from losing the baby in August. He encourages her to say yes, especially to the lucrative financial offer of $100,000, plus 10 percent of the profits.

She reads the synopsis and sees the comic potential. Wilder’s planning to reinvent a 1935 French farce (and a 1951 German remake) into a contemporary love story set in 1929 Chicago. But her part is a supporting role. What’s worse, she’s once again being cast as a dumb blonde.

Marilyn remains undecided. She writes to her friend the poet Norman Rosten and questions, “Should I do my next picture or stay home and try to have a baby again? That’s what Iwant most of all, the baby, I guess, but maybe God is trying to tell me something, I mean with my pregnancy. I’d probably make a kooky mother; I’d love my child to death. I want it, yet I’m scared. Arthur says he wants it, but he’s losing his enthusiasm. He thinks I should do the picture. After all, I’m a movie star, right?”

Her contract specifies that her films must be made in color. This one won’t be. Wilder envisions the period piece in black-and-white.

Technicolor would perfectly suit Marilyn as singer and ukulele player Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk. But Tony Curtis as Joe/Josephine and Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne—two jazz musicians fleeing the mob after accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—will play nearly every scene dressed and made up as women.

Lee Strasberg’s insight into the character relationships finally unlocks the role. “Sugar’s like you,” he says to Marilyn. “You’ve haven’t ever had friends who were girls. Now suddenly, here are two women, and they want to be your friend! They like you. For the first time in your life, you have two friends who are girls!”

Curtis and Lemmon do pass as girls—they even go in costume to the women’s restroom in the MGM commissary to reapply their lipstick, and the other actresses using the mirror recognize them only as women.

MONROE TO DO“HOT,”Varietyannounces in April 1958.

United Artists and the Mirisch Company, which will produce and distribute the film, throw Marilyn a party. Cocktails are called for 7 p.m. and dinner at 9. Most of the A-list guestsare gathering their coats to leave the party when Marilyn finally arrives at 11:20.

By August, sixty pages of the script are finished.

“We’ll finish the rest while we shoot,” Wilder says. He and screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond typically collaborate on the fly. “We sit there and we try to find something,” Wilder says. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes we just sit there and wait.”

On July, 14, 1958, “Marilyn Miller” arrives at Dr. Michael Gurdin’s office at UCLA. Her appointment with the plastic surgeon is a follow-up.

Under “chief complaint,” Gurdin records “chin deformity” on her chart.

“I cannot palpate any cartilage subcutaneously,” the doctor notes, referencing the “mild flatness of chin” treated by “Gurdin and Pangman.”

Gurdin concludes that the “1950 cartilage implant has slowly been absorbed.”

All that’s left is the faded scar.

On August 4, 1958, shooting begins on the back lot of MGM. Marilyn and Wilder immediately clash. “I’m not going back into that film until Wilder reshoots my opening,” Marilyn says, incensed at what she feels is an overemphasis on Tony Curtis’s character.

Her entrance onto a railway platform is reworked. As Marilyn walks by in a black suit, the steam engine puffs two quickblasts of hot air toward her famous legs—a clever nod to the subway grate scene inThe Seven Year Itch.

Marilyn is understandably emotional. She’s just learned that she is once again newly pregnant.

Her husband can’t be on set with her because he is—once again—in court. On August 8, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rules in his favor.MILLER IS CLEARED OF HOUSE CONTEMPT, theNew York Timesreports. The decision, Miller says in a statement, makes “the long struggle of the past few years fully worth while.”

The shoot forSome Like It Hotis projected to run fifty days. To Marilyn, it seems doable with Paula Strasberg by her side.

Marilyn will listen only to Paula. Wilder addresses the situation head-on, pausing each take to ask the acting coach, “How was that for you, Paula?”

The tactic helps keep the peace—for a time.

Wilder’s also heard all about Strasberg and her bag of pills. Marilyn’s pregnancy has put the pills on hold, but without them it’s impossible for her to get to sleep until 3 or 4 a.m. With call times as early as 6:30 a.m., Marilyn’s paranoid insomnia takes hold.

The shoot is already experiencing costly delays. “Marilyn Monroe was ill again yesterday and unable to report to work in ‘Some Like It Hot,’ in which she’s only appeared on set two hours so far,”Varietycolumnist Army Archerd reportson August 21, 1958, adding, “And she’s nixed every still taken.”

In September, the cast and crew move to the beach at Coronado, California, where the historic Hotel Del Coronado is the stand-in for the film’s fictional Florida resort. With jets from the local naval base flying overhead, takes must be carefully timed.

The first day in the new location goes smoothly, with onlookers coming to cheer on Marilyn and Tony Curtis. “Marilyn remembered her lines,” Wilder says. “Everything was fine.”

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