The Making of Some Like It Hot Read online

  Marilyn came to the set around ten. Not bad, considering we had a nine o’clock call. The scene we were doing was the one where we’re unpacking and Sugar invites us for a swim. It was a simple setup. Not a lot of business. It should have been easy. It wasn’t. Marilyn started finding fault with things. She went to her dressing room to consult with Paula. (Arthur Miller had gone back to Connecticut.) Then she asked Allan “Whitey” Snyder, her makeup man, to come in. “She’d pick up on something,” Snyder said. “She’d say her eyebrows were wrong, or her lipstick. Anything to keep from going back to the set.”

  While we were waiting for her to come back, Billy shot the material that took place before she entered, the stuff of Jack and me conspiring. Marilyn finally returned, and we made the scene without a problem. It was funny how she could do an ensemble scene straight through without blowing a line. “Maybe it’s a psychological hurdle,” Billy said. “I’ve noticed that if she gets past the first two or three lines she sometimes can go on and on, even if it’s a long speech. She doesn’t seem to get tired. She’ll do take after take. She poops out the other actors, but she blooms as the day goes on. She’s at her best in the late afternoon, when the other actors are dropping like flies.”

  I spent a lot of time in a bubble bath, shooting my scene with Marilyn. Movie magic prevented my costume from shrinking because it had to fit me in a subsequent scene.

  Billy tried to keep me in the mood of the scene while we waited for Marilyn to show up. I almost turned into a prune. But you can’t tell it on the screen. As I say, movie magic.

  When Marilyn arrived, she proved that she was worth the wait. There was no one like her. There never will be. She had the true movie magic.

  Getting Marilyn’s magic onto the screen was sometimes a challenge. Sometimes a pain. Sometimes maddening. But Billy did it. We all did it.

  I’d seen her last picture, The Prince and the Showgirl. She did long scenes where the camera kept moving and there were no cuts. She was excellent, holding her own against the great Laurence Olivier. We saw the same thing on our film. She did well in uninterrupted scenes, yet when it came to two-shots or close-ups, she suddenly lost confidence. It was odd. Billy had another theory. “Marilyn was trained at Twentieth Century-Fox, the CinemaScope studio,” he explained one day. “In CinemaScope you cannot cut a scene. The screen is too wide. The scenes play much longer than they do in the old aspect ratio. Therefore you cannot cheat. Your performance cannot be created in the editing room. You have to learn the dialogue and you have to sustain a scene.”

  There was a short scene of me and Marilyn in the hallway outside the room, a simple two-shot. No close-ups. It should have taken a half hour to shoot. Marilyn started blowing her lines. Billy didn’t raise his voice. He just said to do it again. This went on. And I saw that Marilyn was having a problem getting through the scene. She was in trouble. I had no idea why. But a pattern was emerging. She would blow a line. She would get into multiple takes. “What did I do wrong?” Then she would start crying. Then Snyder would have to redo her makeup. She’d come back. Finally she would get through the scene. Then, as soon as she finished it, she’d start crying. She was like a person who’s being tortured, but not by somebody else—by herself.

  On Tuesday we were shooting in Joe and Jerry’s room. This was the scene where Sugar and Jerry/Daphne run back from the beach to wait for Joe/Josephine, but he’s already hiding in the bathroom. Billy had given Marilyn an earlier call than usual. By this time, Walter Mirisch was monitoring her progress. “When I drove into the studio in the morning,” said Mirisch, “I was in the habit of asking the guard at the gate if Marilyn had gotten there yet. Because her calls were for seven or eight, in order to get her on the set by nine. And invariably, you know, she would be in her dressing room. At eleven o’clock in the morning they would be on the set waiting for her.”

  It’s true. Eleven thirty rolled around and Marilyn still wasn’t ready. At noon word came from her dressing room. She wasn’t feeling well. May had taken her temperature. She was running a slight fever. Billy asked if she could work for just a while so we could maintain some continuity with what we’d shot the day before. Her hairdresser could match her hair fairly well, but if you went too many days, it would grow, and you’d have to trim it, and there could be problems. I’d heard that her close-ups on the beach weren’t matching. Doane Harrison was assembling a rough cut with Arthur Schmidt, the film’s official editor. The lighting didn’t match, and Marilyn’s eyes looked puffy in some shots. She couldn’t sleep without pills. And they caused her eyes to look puffy for part of the day.

  Marilyn finally came to the set around one. She shot a scene running down the hallway with Jack. Then they did a scene in the doorway of the room, while I was behind the closed doors of the bathroom. Once again, Marilyn was fine in the sustained scene, up to and including the part where she opens the bathroom door and sees me in the bubble bath. After we got a good take, she went to Billy and told him that she really wasn’t feeling well. So that was it for Tuesday.

  On Wednesday, October 8, Marilyn stayed in bed at the Bel Air hotel. Her fever was 102, according to May. We couldn’t shoot around her because the bubbles and all that business would be too hard to match if we shot it out of sequence. So Billy lost another day.

  On Thursday we were back in the bathroom. Marilyn came to work. It took all day to get a two-minute scene of her talking to me in the bathroom. It wasn’t because she was bad. She was more than good. “Marilyn was an excellent dialogue actress,” Billy said. “And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She knew where the laugh came. She knew.” But when she was in a close-up, with the emphasis on her, the responsibility on her, something happened. I was stuck in the bubble bath. Billy was shooting past me. Marilyn started to say a line. Then she stopped. Then she started again. And stopped again. Over and over.

  “Tony had his hands full with Marilyn,” said Jack. “She was ill. We didn’t know that until later. All we knew was that she was driving everybody nuts. You might do forty takes with Marilyn. You might do one. Billy was gonna print the one that was best for her. I figured that out early and I made up my mind, if I let this get to me, it’s going to hurt my performance.”

  I liked working with Jack, but I never really felt secure on Some Like It Hot. It had nothing to do with Jack. It was that almost all of my scenes favored him or Marilyn. I was the straight man for both of them. And I was disappointed. I was hoping this would be a breakthrough for me. It was a Billy Wilder picture, for God’s sake. I mean, how much better could it get? Hitchcock? Ford? Welles?

  Billy was pleasant, and, in fact, he was nice to me. But I had a way of attaching myself to people, thinking of them as older brothers or fathers. I wanted a feeling of security, of belonging, that I hadn’t had as a kid. I wanted someone to look up to. But with Billy I felt like a stepson. I never felt that he really cared that much for me. Maybe it was paranoia, but that was my feeling. I talked about this to Janet. Bright girl that she was, she had an idea. Why not invite Billy and some of the major players over for dinner? Let them see you on your own turf. We invited them, and they accepted. The dinner party was set for Saturday night.

  On Friday, though, we had a rough day. We were shooting the first ballroom scene at the hotel. This would feature the entire orchestra, plus Joe E. Brown and about two hundred dress extras. Marilyn would be singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You” to a playback of her own recording. We waited all morning for her. She wasn’t in her dressing room. She wasn’t at the Bel Air hotel. No one knew where the fuck she was. Jack and I went to lunch in the commissary on the lot. We were eating baked beans and pumpernickel. We were kidding people from the Porgy and Bess company, and they were kidding us. Of course they were. We were in drag. At one point I looked behind me. There was Sidney Poitier standing stock still and staring at me. I raised my eyebrows and winked at him. He shook his head and walked off. I started laughing and ordered more beans.

 
We went back to the set. No Marilyn. It was driving Billy crazy. He didn’t know what to do. There was nothing that he could do, really, so he maintained his affability. He made jokes about it later. “We didn’t waste those hours,” he said. “We played poker. We told war stories. I managed to read War and Peace, Les Misérables, and Hawaii.”

  One day while we were waiting, Billy talked to me about a picture that he wanted to do. It would be about an American Coca-Cola salesman in West Germany. It was going to be called One, Two, Three. Billy was hoping to get Jimmy Cagney for it. There might be a part for me in it. But it didn’t happen. I went from picture to picture. One after another. Billy couldn’t wait for me. And I couldn’t wait for him. Too bad.

  At five, Marilyn showed up. She took her place on the set next to Joan Shawlee. She smiled at her. “Marilyn was very sweet to me,” said Joan. “But she never knew who I was from one day to the next. And we worked together for three months.”

  Billy went over to Marilyn. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Marilyn. “I kind of got lost on my way here.” Which was funny because Marilyn’s copy of the script, the one that Paula carried around for her, had the address of the studio written on it in Marilyn’s handwriting: 1041 North Formosa. We worked until eleven that night, but we got the scene.

  On Saturday Janet and I hosted our dinner party. We’d invited Billy and Audrey Wilder, Jack and Felicia, Lew and Edie Wasserman, Walter and Pat Mirisch, and Jay and Judy Kanter. During the dinner, Billy was talking about the World Series that had just ended with the Yankees whipping the Braves. He was all wound up about that. Luckily it was over or Billy would have been sitting at the dinner table with a transistor radio stuck to his ear, saying “Oh, my God!” Yes, it’s true. He did that. I saw it more than once.

  Anyway, our dinner was in progress and Billy was holding forth on something or other. Suddenly he stopped and sucked in his breath. He was in an odd position. His face was all screwed up. He was obviously in pain. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t walk. His back had just gone out.

  We had to carry him into the bedroom and set him down on the bed. He was moaning. I called my doctor. Luckily he was able to come right over. He gave Billy an anti-inflammatory shot and some kind of painkiller. Everybody there felt that he was having this attack because of Marilyn.

  23

  On Monday, October 13, we were in the ballroom again. Billy was sitting in a hard-backed chair. He couldn’t sit in a canvas-back chair and he couldn’t stand. Because he’d been in the doctor’s office in the morning, shooting had been scheduled for the afternoon. Marilyn’s call was for eleven. We waited. She showed up around three thirty and went directly to her dressing room. We waited some more.

  When I was on the set of a picture, I spent a lot of time waiting. I was used to it. It takes time to light a set and lay down tracks for the camera dolly and all that. But on this picture, I found myself—we all did—waiting a lot longer. It hurt our concentration. I’d come out of my dressing room ready to work. I’d memorized the lines, and I was ready for someone to run them with me. Sometimes it would be an actor who wasn’t in the picture, someone they hired to do that. I was a bit embarrassed having to do that on this picture. I didn’t feel comfortable because there I was, a guy, having to talk to another guy but acting like a woman. I wanted to feel myself going through the scene, not just mouthing words, not wasting my energy on a person who wasn’t going to be in the scene with me.

  In a situation like that, I found it hard to articulate the character. I needed more coaching to get me into the practical part of it. I needed to have the real actor there to give me the feeling that I would have in the scene. That’s how I was able to tie the whole thing together. That’s how I’d learned my craft. On the other hand, once we had a real rehearsal, shot the master and the over-the-shoulder shots, I didn’t need someone there. Billy could shoot my close-ups without anyone feeding me lines. I didn’t want the assistant director to go and bother Marilyn or Jack to come back just to feed me lines. I had trained myself to do without. I could draw on what we’d done already.

  At four thirty Billy sent John Chulay to Marilyn’s dressing room. He knocked politely. She didn’t answer, but he could hear her playing records. He reported to Billy, who made no comment. At a quarter to six Sam and John handed out revised call sheets and dismissed the company. At five past six, Billy walked off the set. According to a security guard, Marilyn walked onto the set at six fifteen and was brought up short to see that there was no one there.

  On Tuesday Marilyn wasn’t scheduled. I had scenes in the lobby with Jack Lemmon, George Raft, and the gangsters. On Wednesday, Marilyn was scheduled to do Monday’s ballroom close-ups. When she hadn’t appeared by noon, Billy had the production manager call her hotel, but he got no answer. A joke started to make the rounds.

  “What does ‘M.M.’ stand for?”

  “Missing Monroe.”

  It was no joke to the Mirisches or to Billy. “Everybody connected with the film is burned up,” publicist Tom Wood told the Associated Press. “Marilyn didn’t even call in today. She just didn’t show up.”

  Billy moved us to the bedroom set and had me do the scene where I’m talking to Marilyn on the telephone, and then I kick the box of flowers (with the diamond bracelet in it) across the hallway. That business was tricky. Try and kick a square object in a straight line. My kick was perfect the first time. I liked that.

  Later when I saw the rough cut and how perfectly the kick matched her reaction shot, I got excited. These things were real to me. There was no way I could not be excited. There I was with Marilyn again. Maybe I started believing that the movie was real. This happens to me when I’m playing a part. If the situation is properly prepared, I begin to lose my identity. I’m still there, but a part of me has been taken over by the character, living in that make-believe place. I’ve always been thankful to the movies for that experience.

  Apparently the bad press reached Marilyn. Or maybe somebody from United Artists called her. She showed up Friday, and we spent all day in the ballroom shooting both scenes. Marilyn had no problem singing to playback or with her lines, although in truth there weren’t that many. But something was up. She looked a little different than she had earlier in the week. I wondered if the sleeping pills were causing her to retain fluid. She wasn’t puffy, exactly. Just fleshier, if that was possible.

  I was in my dressing room after lunch. I usually kept the door open in case someone needed to call me. And I liked to feel that I was part of something. If I’d closed my door, people would think that I was snooty. As I said, Marilyn had the dressing room next to mine. So I saw a lot of what was going on. And heard. The walls weren’t that thick, even with the doors closed. That morning I heard Marilyn retching. When May Reis and Paula Strasberg came and went at lunch time, they looked distressed. Something was up.

  Marilyn had a few more visitors. One of them was a dress extra named Sam Bagley. He was a funny old guy, given to flashy dress and eccentric behavior. The flash included a huge wad of bills. It was imposing until you looked closely. He’d put a hundred-dollar bill on top of a stack of ones. I knew Sam was a crony of Clark Gable’s. There had to be a reason he was checking in with Marilyn. There was. She was trying to learn in a roundabout way if Gable was interested in working with her on the film that Arthur Miller was writing. It was interesting how stars got the “little people” to do their bidding.

  After Sam left, Marilyn closed her door. I kept mine open. I didn’t want them to go to her and get her to the set before I did. I wanted to show respect for her. In a short while I heard John go to her door and knock on it two times. We all knew she was in there. But she wouldn’t answer the door. He kept knocking. Then I heard a murmur. Finally she cracked the door open and asked in kind of a drowsy voice, “What is it?”

  Oh, come on, I thought. What is it? What could it be? The fucking soundstage is on fire?

  “Uh, we’re ready for you, Miss Mo
nroe.”

  “Oh,” she answered, and then she closed the door.

  Later John came back and banged on the door. “Miss Monroe, we’re waiting.” Paula came up behind him and started calling through the door, too. Finally Marilyn came out and walked over to the set. “Sometimes she just would not, could not come out,” Jack Lemmon said later. “I think she was slugging a bit of wine and stuff while she was sitting in there.”

  I wondered about that myself. Marilyn was getting into the habit of calling to May for a red thermos of coffee. She’d sip some and then May would take away the thermos and the paper cup. I got curious. I got one of the production assistants to check the cup. He went digging around in the wastepaper basket. Sure enough, there was vermouth in that thermos. Poor Marilyn. Why was she doing it? No one was as important as she was. Couldn’t she understand the purpose of the experience? Why did it make her crazy? Why did she need some other element to make it work? Alcohol, drugs. I don’t know. But in those scenes where she managed to focus herself, she was great. Somehow she kept herself from falling apart.

  Back on the set, Marilyn and I did the scene where I, still in drag, kiss her on the stage in front of the entire band and then run off to escape the gangsters. Marilyn was “on” that afternoon. High voltage or wattage or however you want to describe the incredible power she had. “She was very tough to work with,” said Billy. “But what you got from her—by hook or by crook—once you saw it on the screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out of her.”

  Billy knew that he was getting something. And it might not last the day. He couldn’t fuck around. He had to shoot as quickly as possible. So a lot of the shots of Marilyn were close-ups, and you had to hope that she matched the business of the scene from one take to the next. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t. You never knew. It wasn’t easy for Billy or for any of us. Since we’d come back from Coronado, Marilyn had gotten obstreperous. She’d heard those remarks about her “comeback.” She’d suddenly become difficult about visitors. It didn’t matter if it was a member of the press, a Goldwyn studio staffer, or a member of the Mirisch family. She didn’t want anyone interrupting her train of thought. Once she was in front of that camera, she could not relax.