Page 74 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“If she goes on at this rate, she’ll be in an institution within two or three years, or dead. Anyone who allowed her to take narcotics ought to be shot,” Huston tells Miller.

Dr. Ralph Greenson had successfully begun to wean her off medication, but when in-person sessions in Los Angeles give way to telephone calls from Reno, Marilyn slips back into destructive patterns.

She’s not the only one. Over a cocktail in a local bar, Montgomery Clift confides to W. J. Weatherby, a British journalist coveringThe Misfitson assignment. “I have the same problem as Marilyn,” says Clift, who’s recovering from a near-fatal car accident. “We attract people the way honey does bees, but they’re generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us, if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves. To be an actor, you can’t afford defenses, a thick skin. You’ve got to be open, and people can hurt you easily.”

Clift orders another drink. Gable sips from pints of whiskey. Huston brings his glass of scotch to the craps table at the hotel casino, losing $25,000, then winning it all back and more. All the while, Miller continues to write and rewrite the script.

Frank Sinatra cuts through the gloom with an invitation to Cal Neva, fourteen acres straddling the California and Nevada border along the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Sinatra and other investors have recently bought and renovated the Cal Neva Lodge & Casino, called the “Lady of the Lake” or “Castle in the Sky,” originally built in 1926. The grand reopening is set for September 1960, so in mid-August he invitesThe Misfitsprincipals to christen the new “Celebrity Room,” a place for him and others to perform. He’s also eager to show off how he’s had the building’s old Prohibition underpasses turned into carpeted privacy tunnels that can be used to shield the Rat Pack and other famous friends from photographers’ lenses.

But Marilyn can’t get happy. Jack Kennedy is nothing more than a flickering image on television. And her lifelong crush and father figure, Clark Gable, is complaining to John Huston, “What the hell is that girl’s problem? Goddamn it, I like her, but she’s so damn unprofessional.”

It doesn’t help that Miller’s falling in love with set photographer Inge Morath. He’s come to realize that there is nothing he can do to salvage his marriage to Marilyn, writing, “If it was plain that her inner desperation was not going to let up, it was equally clear that literally nothing I knew to do would slow its destructive process.”

Director John Huston makes a decision. He sends Marilyn to Los Angeles for treatment at the private Westside Hospital.

Officially, Marilyn is being treated for exhaustion, but unofficially, psychiatrist Ralph Greenson and internist Hyman Engelberg are attempting to end her dependence on barbiturates. Columnist Earl Wilson visits her, looking for a quote on her health. But Marilyn buys his silence with a promise of an even bigger story afterThe Misfitswraps.

Marilyn returns to Reno to finish the film. October 17 is Arthur Miller’s forty-fifth birthday. But instead of toasting her husband at the cast dinner at the Christmas Tree Inn, Marilyn joins John Huston at the craps table.

“What should I ask the dice for, John?”

“Don’t think, honey, just throw,” Huston tells her. “That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.”

Marilyn makes a lucky roll, then falters. She doesn’t know her next play.

Clark Gable does. The fifty-nine-year-old actor is soon to be a first-time father with wife Kathleen “Kay” Williams. “WhenI wind up this picture I’m taking off until after the baby is born. I want to be there and I want to be there a good many months afterward.”

Screenwriter Miller has finally decided that Marilyn’s Roslyn belongs with Clark Gable’s Gay. In the final scene, the pair drives off together in a truck and exchanges their last lines.

Roslyn: “How do we get home?”

Gay: “We’ll follow that star and we’ll get there.”

“Cut! Fine!” Huston calls on November 4. “Thanks, Clark; thanks, Marilyn.”

As the shoot wraps, Gable is pleased with the film. After seeing a rough cut, he tells Miller it’s “the best picture he had made in his life.”

On November 8, 1960, sixty-nine million Americans turn out to cast votes in the presidential election. The popular vote is initially too close to call. But Senator Jack Kennedy edges Vice President Richard Nixon by just 118,550 votes and prevails in the Electoral College 303 to 219. Kennedy will be the first US president born in the twentieth century.

On November 11, Marilyn delivers to columnist Earl Wilson her promise of an exclusive.

“The marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller is over,” Wilson writes, “and there will soon be a friendly divorce.”

Mr. and Mrs. Miller leave Reno in separate cars and return to New York on separate flights.

CHAPTER 51

ON NOVEMBER 16, 1960, a journalist rings Marilyn with terrible news. Clark Gable has died at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, following a series of heart attacks that began ten days earlier on November 6, two days afterThe Misfitswrapped. Gable did not live to see his unborn son.

She is speechless with grief. The man who’d looked so like her father, with his wry smile and his rakish mustache, is gone.

The Misfits,filmed over months in the extreme desert heat and involving the unlawful capture of wild mustangs, was a physical, exhausting shoot. Stunt men took many of the risks, but in the climactic action scene Gable himself was dragged by the stallion he was trying to wrestle down.

“I felt guilty when he died,” Marilyn tells journalist W. J. Weatherby, “in case I put too much strain on him while we were making the movie. But that was stupid. He had a bad heart. No one can give you that. But he was such a strong, upright man—a real gentleman—that it was a great shock.Like your father dying. I wept all night. I’d have gone to his funeral, but I was afraid of breaking down.”

To Dr. Greenson, Marilyn muses, “Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe I kept him waiting, punishing him like my father, getting even for having kept me waiting my entire life.”

Weatherby recalls Clark Gable’s words on the set ofThe Misfits,“She’s worth waiting for.”

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