| Marilyn, Grushenka And The Brothers Karamazov Page 2 Meanwhile, his marriage had collapsed and rumours of an affair with Marilyn began to spread. In June 1956, following a court appearance, Miller announced his engagement to the world’s most famous woman, Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn’s intellectual aspirations had long been the object of ridicule. Just a few months before, a journalist had taunted her about her desire ‘to play The Brothers Karamazov.’ ‘I don’t want to play the brothers,’ Marilyn replied with guileless logic that was anything but naïve. ‘I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.’ When asked to spell Grushenka, Marilyn laughed. ‘Honey, I couldn’t spell any of the names I’ve been telling you.’ But with an acclaimed role in Bus Stop under her belt, and her impending nuptials to Arthur Miller, it seemed that the tide was finally turning. Shortly after the wedding, Marilyn travelled to England to film The Prince And The Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier. It was a gruelling experience. Olivier had little patience with Marilyn’s intuitive, Method-trained approach to acting, and she felt that her production company was being overruled. Worse still, her business manager, Milton Greene, and Arthur Miller treated each other with barely-concealed contempt. In the midst of all this conflict, and with Arthur’s looming court battle in mind, Marilyn had little choice but to decline when a British television company offered her the role of Grushenka in another adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky’s novel finally reached the big screen in 1958, with Austrian actress Maria Schell playing Grushenka, and Yul Brynner as the charismatic Dmitri. The critical reception was muted. Even at two hours, the film seemed truncated and failed to recapture the passion of Dostoyevsky’s text. Despite her disappointment at losing out on her dream role, Marilyn was generous in her assessment of the film. ‘Maria was wonderful in the part,’ she said. Marilyn continued to stand by her husband during his trial. Her appearances outside the court in Washington guaranteed positive coverage for Miller, and he was finally acquitted. But Marilyn’s defence of Miller was controversial within Hollywood, and threatened to destroy her career. ‘Those bastards told me to drop Arthur, but I refused,’ she confided to W.J. Weatherby. ‘They’re born cowards and they want you to be like them.’ Marilyn’s transformation from lonely starlet to self-sacrificing wife bears a striking resemblance to Grushenka’s ultimate redemption in The Brothers Karamazov. When Dmitri is charged with his father’s murder, Grushenka realises that her love for him is genuine, and that her ill-treatment of him has played a part in his downfall. She stands by Dmitri in court and is determined to prove his innocence. By the end of the novel, virtuous Katerina has revealed herself to be deceitful and a hypocrite. But Grushenka finds her own salvation through selfless love for Dmitri. In the same way, Marilyn set aside her own ambitions to support the man she loved, Arthur Miller. But long after The Brothers Karamazov was released, many of Marilyn’s peers came to believe that Marilyn would have been as good, if not better, than Maria Schell in the role of Grushenka. Actress Anna Sten, who studied alongside Marilyn at the Actor’s Studio, insisted, ‘She would have been fascinating in it. Fabulous. I could see that from talking with her. That was a searching soul. You see, the other one (Maria Schell), was on the surface only. She's Russian because she wears a babushka, so she thinks she's Russian! But Marilyn Monroe was probing and searching into why is Grushenka such as she was? What is there to that woman that makes her a classic character and far above ever so many fascinating characters? Why? Why? What is there? After all, if you put her on half a page, what can you say about her?’ ‘It's because of the depth of it,’ Sten continued. ‘You've got to understand such a thing, and Marilyn did. She sought me out at the Studio. She was that kind of person herself. Oh yes, she was very deep and very lovely. I only ever saw her do one thing at the Studio, when she did Anna Christie and everybody is still talking about it, how magnificent she was. She was giving and taking at the same time. That's a very rare quality. Because usually it's very one-sided, either you give or you take. But when you give both, then you have the audience with you.’ |
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| By Tara Hanks |
