Arizona is where Norma Jeane Baker’s work on Bus Stop becomes both her most wholehearted encounter with a role and the setting of a spring crisis she cannot explain. The state’s red mountains, stark desert imagery, and unnerving night light frame a collision between Cherie, the character she believes she understands intimately, and the return to the public identity of Marilyn Monroe that awaits her beyond the set.

The production and its landscape

The Arizona material belongs to the Bus Stop shoot, which began with something close to magical fervor. Norma Jeane arrived after a long flight west, having said goodbye to her playwright lover at LaGuardia Airport. He faced the prospect of divorce; she faced a return to Marilyn Monroe. The change of place was therefore also a change of pressure: New York and the intimacy she had left behind gave way to a film set where the demands of work and her precarious private life would become increasingly difficult to separate.

The landscape registers through sharply contrasting images rather than as a neutral backdrop. On a trip to Sedona, north of Phoenix, the red mountains and the absence of another living soul suggested either the beginning of the world or its end. Norma Jeane imagined the travelers as time voyagers who had gone too far to return. The scene gives Arizona’s open country an unsettling scale: its apparent emptiness offers not simple release but the possibility of being stranded beyond familiar time and human company.

At night, the moon is so bright that it seems capable of blinding, while the air is cold. Curtains closed and eyes covered cannot keep the unfamiliar landscape out of awareness. The desert returns in a vision as an overexposed daytime photograph, then as a night sky punctured with lights like distant cries. The impulse is not only to shield the eyes but to stop the ears as well. Arizona is thus made perceptible through an excess that cannot be shut out, even indoors.

Cherie and the work of acting

On the set, Norma Jeane experiences herself as moving among three identities: Norma Jeane, Marilyn, and Cherie. Her Method training at the New York Ensemble gives her a way to approach the role through remembered experience and the principle of playing oneself. She believes she knows Cherie down to the mending in her shabby, innocent chanteuse costumes, just as she knows the earlier version of herself who took modeling titles and offered smiles in the hope of being loved and hired.

Cherie’s imagined background gives this identification its force. Norma Jeane pictures her as a girl from a poor family living in a dilapidated trailer on abandoned land, caring for younger siblings, leaving school at fifteen, singing along with country-and-western songs on the radio, and making cloth toys and mending clothes. The father has run away; the mother is described as a heavy drinker. These details make Cherie’s fear of returning to where she came from more than a passing character trait. Norma Jeane sees the role as a person shaped by responsibility and deprivation, whose pride and spirit have survived heartbreak and poverty.

This is the first film role she feels she has truly been able to choose. Previously, the studio assigned her parts as though she had no right to refuse them; with Cherie, she can commit herself to a character rather than merely submit to a role chosen for her. She believes she can make the audience love Cherie and break its heart. Yet her investment is not uncomplicated confidence. She is afraid to watch the dailies, uncertain whether Marilyn has betrayed her, and unsure how her repeatedly filmed, intensely effortful scenes will appear to an impartial viewer. Like Cherie, she throws herself into the work with instinct and a kind of blind optimism.

Crisis, care, and interruption

During the Arizona shoot, the experiences unfolding on the set and those that had occurred in Los Angeles seem too strange and elusive to name. In sleepless nights under the brilliant moon, Norma Jeane calls Doc Fell to her room for help sleeping. He is the studio’s new doctor, assigned to the production and later to the Arizona location; she encounters him in pajamas and a robe. His role combines medical authority with the unsettling intimacy of attending her in the bedroom. At times he administers liquid Nembutal directly into a vein, and even his thumb searching for a vein on the soft inside of her forearm can feel like relief. Her repeated insistence that it is only this once underscores how precarious that reliance has become.

Her distress is interrupted when her playwright lover flies to Arizona to be with her, despite the damage in his own life. He has also been summoned back to Washington to answer questions about alleged political activities from twenty years earlier, a danger he is afraid to disclose to her. He finds her profoundly changed: the golden-haired woman with the bright laugh seems absent. After his arrival, however, she appears to revive within a day. The change is described as a transfusion that strengthens both of them rather than draining him. Arizona becomes the place where care briefly reverses the crisis, even as the threat he has not told her about follows him there.

Return, distance, and aftermath

The improvement does not make the filming straightforward. Cherie’s work is shot so many times, and Norma Jeane is so preoccupied with the effort of performance and the beating of her hummingbird heart, that she cannot judge what the finished scenes will amount to. She does not see the complete film until the studio preview in early September, months after the Arizona period. By then she is happily married and sits beside her husband in the front row, under the effects of Dom Pérignon and Miltown, watching a film whose comic and noisy beginning leads into a romantic, sentimental ending.

An episode of despair also gives way to a public return to the character. Dragging a soiled feather boa behind her, Norma Jeane apologizes to the people she has let down, speaking in Cherie’s rough Ozark accent and admitting that she had acted irresponsibly in desperation. The crew’s frustration and anger vanish into applause. The moment links her apology to the role she has inhabited: Cherie’s voice and costume become the means through which the shaken performer re-enters the company’s regard.

While in Arizona, she writes illustrated postcards to Gladys Mortensen at Lakewood, continuing a habit begun in New York. She has stopped telephoning and instead sends pictures of the Southwest, imagining that one day they might visit together when she is rich. In her messages, the region becomes the end of the world. The postcards offer a small counterpoint to the isolation of the desert: they make a distant landscape into something she can share, though the hoped-for journey with her mother remains only an imagined future.

At the September preview, Norma Jeane is astonished by how well the film has turned out. Cherie proves the most inspired performance of her career, and the audience applauds. But the success is measured against survival rather than effortless triumph: she has crossed turbulent water without being swept away and reached the bank exhausted, while the audience applauds without having risked the crossing. Arizona’s importance lies in this double outcome. The shoot becomes a creative achievement, but the landscape and the events there also expose how much labor and instability that achievement contains.