Part Nine

Earl Wilson reported on September 18 that Fox has a "half-promise" from Brando on the project and wants MM or Liz Taylor to star opposite. But only some are pleased with the possibility of Monroe in the part. One reader complained to columnist Mike Connolly on October 12 that "the role as envisioned and intended by Maugham is far above Monroe's head." Connolly's response is, "Don't underestimate Marilyn."

Marilyn meets with Jerry Wald about the role.

On December 14, Shelia Graham noted how Jane Fonda wanted to play the part, but Cukor had MM in mind for the remake of the Maugham story by Jerry Wald. On February 1, 1962, Hedda Hopper surmised that Bette Davis might not be too pleased that Marilyn could play Mildred opposite Richard Burton. Two weeks later, Walter Scott said, "20th is toying with the idea of Of Human Bondage. There is some doubt as to whether Miss Monroe is capable of essaying so dramatic a role, as she is more a comedienne."

Fox might have felt the same way, as the film Monroe and Cukor finally began work on was a remake of My Favorite Wife starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. A light, comedic romance about a wife returning after being lost at sea five years prior and just declared dead so her husband could remarry. Co-starring Dean Martin, Marilyn was about as excited to make this film as Goodbye Charlie. But as this would fulfill her contract, she did her best while fighting a chronic case of sinusitis. It was her leaving to sing Happy Birthday for President Kennedy, and the days afterward, she missed production that caused 20th to fire her on June 1, her 36th birthday.

In July 1962, Marilyn told photographer George Barris, with whom she was working on an autobiography, "I was going to do Somerset Maugham's Rain—the Sadie Thompson role. I find it an exciting one, but the deal fell through. I wanted Lee Strasberg, my drama coach, to direct me in it, but N.B.C. wanted an experienced T.V. director. I think it can be an exciting movie for the big screen."

A month later, on August 5, Marilyn was found dead from an accidental overdose by her housekeeper. Strasberg delivered her eulogy to a small group of friends and family at Westwood Village Cemetery three days later.

"Despite the heights and brilliance she attained on the screen, she was planning for the future; she was looking forward to participating in the many exciting things which she planned. In her eyes and in mine her career was just beginning. The dream of her talent, which she had nurtured as a child, was not a mirage."

Several months after her death, Hedda Hopper interviewed Henry Hathaway, who had directed Marilyn in Niagara. He told Hopper that when he'd approached Fox in 1958 about a remake of Bondage starring Marilyn and Montgomery Clift, he was "laughed right out of the studio." But he had confidence in Monroe's talent. "I firmly believe she'd be alive today if she had played Of Human Bondage. It would have given her the role she longed for, which I know she could have done."

Now, knowing all this information, it's a shame things fell apart, and Marilyn never had the opportunity to appear in any of these films, which certainly would have changed the opinion of her critics. Not to mention the possibility of her, not Taylor, starring opposite Burton in Cleopatra, which would've changed Hollywood history, one of the "greatest love affairs" of the century, "La Liz," might have remained Mrs. Eddie Fisher!

Was Rain a doomed project from the start? Was Marilyn being held back by the studio and those around her, including the Strasbergs? Marilyn's film directors loathed Paula Strasberg, like Monroe's previous drama coach Natasha Lytess, as the actress paid almost no attention to them, gazing beyond to Paula, hidden in the shadows, to see if that take had been acceptable. Director George Roy Hill told Hedda Hopper in a February 1962 column when she inquired why he left the ill-fated project: "When Mrs. Strasberg insisted upon sitting on the set, I bowed out!" Hill's more significant successes would occur years later with his directing Thoroughly Modern Millie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Slaughterhouse Five, and The World According to Garp, among others.

Marilyn began filming Something's Got to Give in April 1962. Complications, illness. Fired. Re-signed. Supposedly, What a Way to Go, other films.

Everyone but DiMaggio had a financial stake in Monroe completing the project. While losing Monroe was depressing, there would be other projects for the Network, Marlowe, the lawyers, and the agents. The biggest losers were the audience. This role could've cemented Marilyn as a legitimate dramatic actress and taken her career in a completely different direction. The largest amount of blame must be laid at Lee Strasberg's feet. His selfishness and greed caused the Actor's Studio to lose a $225,000 endowment.

After Monroe's death, Lee told author Fred Lawrence Guiles. "I thought that she could have brought it to the same kind of tremulousness which I remember Jeanne Eagels possessing, an inner kind of quality, a sense of something really taking place, a reaching out, a wanting to be different and better, wanting to raise herself out of the kind of morass that she'd gotten into and her terrible disappointment when she (Sadie Thompson) discovers that the preacher is only a man, that all he wants is what every other man wants. It's very vivid in my mind...I felt that Marilyn could do that wonderfully and, in certain ways, even more so. I hate to say that because maybe it's my memory that's at fault, but I thought she could do that quite superbly. And that's what I saw in the part - a kind of colorfulness, a strange romantic quality, mainly this gauze-like quality, this tremulousness, together with the other things which had that didn't need to be worked on."