The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by Donald H. Wolfe

Author:Donald H. Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

The new Marilyn had hoped that Lee Strasberg would accompany her to Hollywood and coach her through Bus Stop, but it was impossible for him to leave his students, and he suggested that Paula go in his stead. Though Greene complained and Fox fumed, Marilyn insisted that Paula Strasberg be put on the payroll at $1,500 a week—the salary Marilyn earned on The Seven Year Itch as its star.

Bus Stop is the poignant story of Cherie, a second-rate cabaret singer from the Ozarks. After a series of disappointing love affairs, Cherie meets a rodeo cowboy (Don Murray) who has come to the big city (Phoenix) in pursuit of an angelic wife to take home to his ranch. He chooses Cherie. She resists but ultimately is charmed by the cowboy’s bumbling devotion.

As the start date for Bus Stop approached, Marilyn worked long hours with Paula, going through the script scene by scene. She immersed herself in the character of Cherie, drawing on sense memory and emotional recall, analyzing dialogue and motivation, thinking out body language and gesture. She studied Cherie’s Ozarks drawl, and once she was into it seldom departed from Cherie’s dialect in her daily conversations until production ended. Strasberg urged his students to sum up a character’s central motivation in one key sentence: the key sentence Marilyn chose for Cherie was “Will this girl who wants respect ever get it?”

Marilyn felt that the dominant characteristic of the character’s appearance lay in her weariness. Seldom out in the sunlight because she works in bars until 4 A.M., Cherie wouldn’t get much sleep or sunshine, and Marilyn and Milton Greene conceived a chalky white makeup that startled the front-office staff when they saw the makeup tests. If they were going to pay her more, shouldn’t she look better?

“To me Marilyn’s attitude toward her makeup and costuming was courageous,” Joshua Logan stated. “It was incredible, really. Here you have a well-established star and she was willing to risk her position with a makeup many stars would consider ugly. She wasn’t afraid. She believed she was right in her analysis of the character, and she had the courage to commit herself to it completely.”

Logan recalled that Marilyn also plotted out Cherie’s costuming. She liked William Travilla’s design for the long gown she was to wear during her ballad number in a Phoenix bar, but to Travilla’s dismay she began yanking off spangles and tore the gown in several places. She then had the tears crudely sewn up with mismatched thread. Recalling her own days when she only had one pair of stockings, she had the net stockings worn during “That Old Black Magic” number ripped and then poorly darned back together.

“Let’s not have my clothes made to order,” she told Logan. “Let’s find them in wardrobe.” She and Logan rummaged through clothing racks and picked out the tawdry dresses and cheap clothes that a second-rate cabaret singer would wear.

Logan, who was a good friend of Lee Strasberg and the only prominent American director

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