You told me that Itch was inspired by a real person. How often do you do that—take dialogue from real people?
I do listen to people. Almost all my original stuff is based on a real person; most, loosely. Almost everything starts
with a person. Something about that person which gets me thinking—and, mostly, it's a woman.

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Why?
I don't know why. A lot of stuff was written for Marilyn. I had a big, professional, emotional hang-up with Marilyn.
When did you meet Marilyn?
When I first came out and started working with Billy in '53. She was rehearsing a musical at 20th—I remember she
was doing a dance routine with [the choreographer] Jack Cole on a hot, sweaty soundstage in grungy rehearsal
clothes, all covered with sweat, and she was just edible—glorious.
Poor Marilyn. I did two pictures with her and got to know her pretty well. She was a sad, sad, sad creature. She
was sick. In a rightly ordered world, she would have been in a nuthouse. She was psychotic. Once you got to know
her, one couldn't feel sexy about her. She was pathetic, sad. You just wanted to comfort her, cuddle her, father
her, say, "It's going to be all right, child."
Did she ever involve herself, critically or otherwise, in the process of writing?
No.
Did she make script suggestions?
Not that I ever heard.
She would read the lines as written?
If she could remember them, and she couldn't.
If she couldn't, then she might do some interpolation?
No. She'd burst into tears and run off. The scene on the bus in Bus Stop, where she's pouring her heart out to
Hope Lange, was a nightmare to shoot. "Rear projection" wasn't as good as it is now, so they kept running out of
film. We had this rickety insert of a bus, and a rear projection screen, and Hope and Marilyn with a big, long
speech, and Marilyn couldn't remember the words. Josh's dialogue director was propped up just outside of the
screen, feeding her the lines, which she would parrot back. She had reached a point in her neurosis where if
anybody said, "Cut!" she took it as an affront, burst into tears, and ran into her dressing room. So Josh never said
cut. He'd run the whole nine hundred feet, keep running it and running it while he talked to her.
He was a huge man. Josh, so most of the time the screen was filled with Josh's behind and Marilyn's face, with this
voice coming from the sky reading the lines that Marilyn would parrot. It took four days to shoot this scene, but it
cut together like a dream, partly because Hope Lange is a professional actress and we'd cut to her. Little pieces
of what Marilyn would do were inspired, magical, but interspersed with tears and "oh, shit!" and "what the fuck!"
and getting her back together—all of it with the camera running because you couldn't say cut. God, the goings-on!
Is there any way to compare working with Josh Logan to Billy Wilder?
They were both very strong, very powerful idea people, and Josh again was a writer of sorts—again, a writer who
never actually set words to paper. He dictated. He dictated scenes to Joe Curtis, his assistant, the dialogue
director whose voice was heard coming from above Marilyn on the bus. He was Josh's writing tool.
Was Josh involved at all in the adaptation of Bus Stop?
Oh yes. He took my first draft, and we really worked on it together for another two to four months. He was very
important to that script. He channeled it.
The only other time I worked with George was on the last Marilyn Monroe movie. Something's Got to Give. I was
on the picture about six weeks. I was rewriting it when it shut down. Although the original that it was based on was
such a good movie [My Favorite Wife, 1940] that you wondered why they wanted to change anything.
I had read somewhere that they were looking for writers for this project at Fox. I called Lazar and said, "How about
this situation?" He said, "I'll call Zanuck and get on it right away," but then I never heard anything from Lazar. So
finally I just picked up the phone and called George. He said, "Are you free? That's great. Absolutely." I asked,
"Didn't Lazar call you?" He said, "No." I called Lazar, and the deal was made.
Again, it was an impossible situation. What was interesting is that nobody really liked Monroe . I didn't like her,
particularly; the one I liked was Dean Martin, who I thought behaved terribly well. He liked to swing his golf clubs,
and I had heard about his drinking; but when he had to do something on the set, he was very professional. He
wasn't an actor of the sort that Cukor was used to dealing with—Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, people like that—
but I liked him.
Whereas Monroe was totally unreliable. Nobody knew what she was going to do. Cukor was very calm about her.
Just terribly nice, always. Courteous. And optimistic. "It's gonna work, we're gonna do it . . . " I never saw the other
side.
How was Cukor when it all came down?
Fatalistic. He'd been in that mill for a long time. I remember what [the director] Lewis Milestone said to me once—
he was a great raconteur—he had one terrible story after another about Hollywood . I asked him, "How can you
take this abuse? How can you live with this?" He looked at me with his marvelous hooded eyes and said, "How
does an alley cat live in the alley?" Cukor had a little bit of that. He'd seen it all. He did his job and lived in his nice
house . . .  
After the blacklist ended and your credits resumed, you could have moved back to Los Angeles .
I had made the decision to live in New York . In certain ways, in terms of career, it was not a good decision.
Perhaps I would have had a stronger career
I know from reading David Brown's autobiography. Let Me Entertain You, that you had at least one not-marvelous
experience in Hollywood in the sixties, working with Cukor again, this time on the last, never-completed Marilyn
Monroe picture. Something's Got to Give.
I haven't read David's book, but I've been told he said I wore a kimono and sat on the floor when I wrote. Clearly, I
was crazy, so he fired me. I still wear a kimono and sit on the floor when I write, and lots of people think I'm crazy—
maybe I am—but David and I recall the situation differently.
Actually, I quit. Cukor wanted me because we had such a good experience on the Magnani picture, but when I
found out what they were doing to Marilyn, I quit. They were setting her up. A guy from the advertising business
named Peter Levathes had come in as head of the studio, having taken over from [Spyros] Skouras, who was
kicked out, as I recall, because Cleopatra [1963] went so much over budget. Levathes had to prove himself a
hero. He had to prove he wouldn't take any shit from any star. He wanted to humiliate Marilyn into quitting and
then sue her, I was told.
You were Marilyn's friend?
From way back. I met her when she first left Hollywood and came to join the Actors Studio. I got a call one night
from Lee Strasberg, and he said, "I've got two tickets to a poetry reading at the Y. I can't go. Will you take the
person I'm supposed to go with?" I said, "Sure." I had no idea it was Marilyn until she opened the door. This was at
the peak of her fame. I didn't have a car or anything, so we had to catch a cab. We got mobbed. We finally got to
the Y. I'm thinking, "Why does she want to go to theY? Why didn't Lee tell me who I was going with?" And, of
course, the program couldn't go on, because everybody left their seats to catch a glimpse of her. We escaped
through a side door and ran up the street with a mob chasing us, and finally wound up on 125th Street in a dinky
Chinese restaurant I knew about. That's how I met her, and we became good friends.
What was her condition at the time when you were working on the script? Was she deteriorating, as everybody
has written?
I didn't see any of that. When I was with her, she was bright, warm and loving, and in good shape.
She wasn't demanding?
Not at all.
She was on time for everything?
She didn't have to be on time. This wasn't even preproduction. I hadn't written a word. But her agent would call
and request things—I remember one thing in particular—and Fox would deliberately say no, doing everything to
make her quit. She wanted her regular hairdresser, I remember. No—she couldn't have her regular hairdresser.
Whatever she wanted, the rule was, she couldn't have it. Gradually, it became clearer and clearer what was going
on—and then I overheard conversations about it between the executives.
As soon as I realized it, I went ape. I think I grabbed David Brown, who is about two feet taller than I am, and shook
him against the wall; if not, I wanted to, which is probably closer to the truth. I called Marilyn and told her. She
understood what was happening, but there was nothing she could do about it.
You think they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams—driving her to her death?
It's not that cut and dried. But they certainly didn't contribute to her will to live.
Cukor was party to this?
He knew about it.
That's shocking.
The whole thing was shocking to me. She asked me to come back and write the picture and be on her side. I told
her I was on her side, and that is why I got out of it. I told her she had to get out of it. "If I go back," I told her, "I'm
powerless." I have terrible guilt about that experience, still. Terrible guilt. The lingering feeling, however irrational,
that if I had gone back, I might have made a difference, and she might still be alive today.
Photograph of Axelrod and Marilyn Monroe on the set of  Bus Stop , directed by Joshua Logan.
(Courtesy of George Axelrod.)
All photos are copyrighted by their respective owners & should not be used for commercial purposes.