Don Murray got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his part in Bus Stop (airing on TCM in just a couple of days).
Were they trying to make Marilyn Monroe go insane?
Prone to seeing betrayal and intrigue all around her, Monroe was already seething that her best work on Bus Stop had been trashed. Her “best work” consisted of a scene set on the titular bus, as her character Cherie confided in fellow passenger Hope Lange about her secret hopes.
This was not her wheelhouse—subtle character work, drama. It was a set-up all but calculated to push Monroe’s anxieties to the limit.
To start with, the deliberately anti-glamorous look she had concocted for Cherie was a source of anxiety—this was going to ruin her sex appeal. In an effort to convince herself she still “had it” she’d been relentlessly flirting with Don Murray. But Murray had fallen for (wait for it) Hope Lange — they were soon married–and so any interaction with Lange chafed Monroe’s rawest nerves.
There was another problem. The scene called for Monroe to deliver a long monologue, which needed to be filmed in a single take without cutaways. In all her career, Marilyn had never been asked to handle so long a speech at one time.
It went as you would expect: director Joshua Logan started the camera, called “action,” Marilyn started talking — and then it all fell apart. A misspoken word, a misplaced inflection, a misdirected gesture, something. Logan would call “cut!” and the cycle began anew. Nerves frayed, the day trickled away, and gradually Logan noticed something. Marilyn was more likely to screw it up at the top of the scene, and got better as it went. That first instant, as the camera starts up, was all nerves and expectation — a psychological flashpoint for the fragile actress.
So Logan just stopped calling “cut.” Instead, he let the camera roll, and allowed Marilyn to restart again and again on her own, until she nailed it. At the pace they’d been going, she might have taken days to get it right; Logan had gotten it from her in hours.
And then Fox executives dropped it from the film. Bus Stop was too long, they said, and the scene dragged things to a crawl.
Monroe fumed that Logan would allow her triumph, so hard won and dear, to be discarded like that. This was on him.
Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman in the world. This is not an opinion, it is simply a fact. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder: when the beholders number in the countless millions, across all cultures around the globe, then the question of beauty transcends personal taste and enters the realm of objective truth.
Back in ancient Troy, this kind of beauty started wars. In the middle of the 20th century, it created celebrities. Living in a spotlight that intense had its price: there was no way to step back out of the spotlight. She lost her privacy. Every move she took was photographed, celebrated, analyzed, consumed, even ridiculed.
Case in point: she had enrolled in Lee Strasburg’s fabled Actor’s Studio to study “The Method.” The movie press collectively laughed — look at the dumb blonde who thinks she can act! “Will acting spoil Marilyn Monroe?” the headlines crowed.
It’s not like she hadn’t been a dramatic actress before. She had already played it straight in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night but that was a supporting role, back before she was famous. For those who knew her only as the cartoon sex bomb of The Seven Year Itch, her early dramatic work might as well have been prehistory.
To break the stereotypes, Marilyn Monroe needed to escape her own image. Monroe took steps to prove that she meant it. She legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, as if to prove she was no poseur. She was Marilyn Monroe.
Then she renegotiated her contract with 20th Century Fox to assert control over her films. From now on, she would choose the scripts, the directors, the technicians. She formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, with herself as President, to administer these new responsibilities.
Bus Stop was the first film to be made under this new arrangement. On Broadway, William Inge’s play had been a long-running hit, even nominated for a Tony. Inge was a prestigious playwright — not unlike Arthur Miller, who at the time was holed up in Nevada, trying to establish residency so he could divorce his wife and be free to wed Marilyn.
Bus Stop had a lot to offer Marilyn in her bid to bridge the gap between Movie Star and Serious Actress.
The female lead, Cherie, is an aspiring actress and a terrible singer. “I’m a chanteuse,” she says, with her Southern twang making “chanteuse” sound faintly obscene. Cherie has slept her way to the very bottom, but still holds impossible hopes that her dead-end job at a Phoenix saloon is just a way station on the way to stardom in Hollywood. One day. She is, in short, a shopworn sexpot, who does not even realize her best days are already behind her.
And therein lies the irony–Marilyn Monroe, playing someone who wants to be like Marilyn Monroe but isn’t. How better for Marilyn to demonstrate she could play someone other than herself?
She handpicked as her director Joshua Logan, a man better known for his work on such stage hits as South Pacific and Picnic. He had, in fact, directed the film adaptation of Picnic, which had opened in theaters just as the stage version of Bus Stop opened in New York, with Actor’s Studio alum Kim Stanley in the role Monroe would play onscreen.
Logan, though, was wary of the New Marilyn. The “old” Marilyn was a notorious flake–always late, unable to remember her lines. Was Marilyn 2.0 a worthwhile upgrade, or did it burden an already buggy system with unnecessary new features? Strasburg confided in Logan that of the hundreds of actors who had studied with him, there were only two he thought really stood out from the pack. Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. This was high praise indeed.
Together they developed Cherie as a cruel parody of Marilyn’s screen image. Her skin is as chalky as a vampire’s, to show how the poor girl’s nocturnal life denies her sunlight. Her wardrobe is tawdry and threadbare, her hair tousled and unkempt. She moves like a gangly puppet, her voice is grating. Fox executives watched nervously, as she studiously undermined everything audiences came to expect from her.
It did not come easily. Logan tried to accommodate her chronic unreliability, but she leaned heavily on that patience and strained it to the breaking point. And then, she strained it past the breaking point. With hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake if she didn’t get on set now, Logan dragged her forcibly in a humiliating moment she could not forgive.
Meanwhile, newcomer Don Murray, playing opposite Monroe, found himself on the receiving end of her tantrums. It made for a tense set, dominated by mutual hostility and unrelieved antagonism.
Had Bus Stop been a different movie, such on-set stress could have helped establish the on-screen mood. That is, had Bus Stop played its drama as a horror movie.
The stuff of a horror movie is all there: Don Murray plays a nave but physically intimidating young man, whose sheltered life on his cattle ranch has left him with no understanding of other people, certainly not of girls. He’s used to asserting his will on other creatures, and simply cannot comprehend that there is anything else to life.
When his friend Virgil (Arthur O’Connell) tries to explain that maybe Cherie resents being hogtied like a farm animal and hauled against her will onto a bus for a life of forced servitude, Bo is bewildered: “How else was I gonna get her on the bus?”
He is huge and strong, heedless of social graces and unconcerned what anyone else thinks of him. He is a sort of monster, and his relentless pursuit of Cherie has similarities to various film noir tales of kidnappers and hostages–Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker for example. Those connotations are there, undeveloped. At no point does Logan attempt to explore the thriller aspects of the story he has in front of him.
This is partly because Murray plays the role for laughs. He yells every line, and swaggers through each scene as if the Beverly Hillbillies‘ Jethro had been jacked up on coke and let loose. Cherie admits to finding this human freakshow physically attractive; Bo is insulted that she isn’t equally attracted to his mind. To demonstrate his intellectual side, he blusters into her bedroom, wakes her up, pins her naked body under his, and screams the Gettysburg Address into her ear. The scene’s absurdity masks its terror–Bo is just this side of raping her, but instead of sexual violence, he’s hollering a piece of grade-school recital.
The audience laughs nervously, because there’s nothing to laugh at.
Bo is the sort of fella who won’t take “no” for an answer, so the fact that Cherie can only muster up a half-hearted and ambivalent “no” doesn’t deter him at all. At every juncture, she continues to beckon him on. She doesn’t really want to be tied up, kidnapped, forcibly married, and abducted to an almost uninhabited wilderness…but neither is she entirely against the idea. Because of all the things she wants, being loved — truly loved — is the one she wants most, and say what you will about this big lug, he really wants her.
Despite all this, Bus Stop isn’t a thriller. It also isn’t a comedy, although Murray plays his role with a broadness that veers into slapstick farce. There are a couple of songs, but it’s not a musical. It builds to a mythical fight between cowboys staged at a remote Western outpost, but it isn’t a Western. It’s hard to say exactly what it is–other than a self-consciously serious vehicle for a self-consciously serious actress.