Reno, Nevada, is both the setting of the 1961 production of The Misfits and a charged counterpart to its story: a desert city associated with divorce, where Roslyn comes to free herself and Marilyn Monroe struggles to begin the role. The Zephyr Hotel gathers the production’s private strain and Fleece’s brief, ruinous visit under one roof, making Reno a place of attempted escape, exposure, and disorder.

Reno and The Misfits

The narrative identifies Reno as the setting in 1961 and as the place where Monroe and her husband, the Playwright, live during the filming of The Misfits. They occupy rooms on the Zephyr Hotel’s tenth and top floor; the hotel takes its name from Zephyr Cove. Reno’s place in the story is shaped by its reputation as the capital of divorce. Roslyn’s presence there is therefore legible as an effort to become free, while Monroe’s own marriage is already failing: she no longer loves the Playwright, though he continues to love her.

The city’s landscape sharpens this parallel. From the hotel room, Reno’s sun-struck streets and casino neon lie beneath distant, pale peaks called The Virginias. The desert setting makes Roslyn’s imagined departure from her former life seem at once possible and starkly exposed. The film itself is framed as a black-and-white memory, closer to a film of the 1940s than the 1960s, with dead actors and the air of something already posthumous. Reno thus holds both the production’s present and the story’s retrospective sense of loss.

Monroe at the hotel and on the set

On the first day of filming, with work scheduled to begin at ten, Monroe has shut herself in the hotel bathroom by nine. The mirrors she encounters intensify her fear of her own reflection, and she refuses to let even Whitey in to help. She has not slept through the night; if she has slept at all, the barbiturates have left her in a near-catatonic torpor. She tells the people outside to leave her alone, while the Playwright pleads with her to open the door and threatens to have hotel staff remove it from its hinges.

At eleven fifteen, the Playwright goes to the set and apologizes on her behalf, offering a succession of explanations for her absence and promising she will come later. John Huston agrees to film scenes that do not require her and wait. By noon, Monroe is still in the room, her vision blurred as she tries to read the script. She insists inwardly on being Roslyn from head to toe and regards the part as the role of her life, yet can only hope to reach the set by mid-afternoon or early evening. She believes Huston will understand and thinks of him as a father figure who launched her career.

The hotel’s public spaces and the streets outside do not offer privacy. Monroe wears sunglasses against the severe glare and tries to avoid photographers and reporters waiting in the lobby or on the street. The set is closed to journalists, but public places are not. Their pursuit angers Huston, who complains that the attention she attracts disrupts the work and spreads to everyone around her. The account also marks the strain on Monroe’s face and eyes: fine lines frame them, and the once-bright blue has become a web of burst capillaries. Reno’s publicity glare and her physical exhaustion press against her determination to act professionally.

Fleece’s visit and its aftermath

Fleece accepts Monroe’s invitation to Reno as her guest of honor, returns her plane ticket, and travels by Greyhound. Over three days at the Zephyr, she charges more than three hundred dollars in room service, mostly for liquor. Cigarette burns and spilled liquids damage the room; after falling asleep in the bathtub with the taps running, she lets water seep through the floor into the room below. Monroe is left to pay for the damage.

Fleece also pawns the gold Bulova watch Monroe had impulsively given her, a gift from Mr. Z inscribed for his Sugar Kane, along with other stolen hotel objects. Among them is a brass lamp shaped like a rearing horse, which she wraps in the shower curtain before taking it. At Reno’s casinos she loses every penny of the hundred-dollar stake Monroe provided. She never goes to the set of The Misfits.

The visit ends in a public and dangerous breach of the hotel’s fragile domestic arrangement. Fleece, heavily drunk, kisses Monroe passionately in front of the Playwright, who is himself slightly drunk or pretending to be. After abandoning Monroe and the Playwright during a restaurant dinner at daybreak, Fleece is arrested in a casino bar for wounding a blackjack dealer with a knife. She remains in custody on several charges, including armed assault, until Monroe arrives in sunglasses, visibly tired, and pays one thousand dollars bail. A tabloid publishes photographs of her trying to shield her eyes from the flash. Fleece soon disappears from Reno, probably by Greyhound, leaving only a note slipped beneath Monroe’s hotel-room door; the note’s contents are not given.

Narrative significance

Reno joins two forms of attempted release without making either seem secure. Roslyn’s fictional divorce gives the city a promise of escape, while Monroe’s own estranged marriage and her difficulty reaching the set expose the gap between a role’s apparent resolve and the actress’s exhaustion. The hotel bathroom, where she cannot face her reflection, stands in sharp contrast to the public lobby and street, where reporters make her image available to them.

Fleece’s stay turns the same hotel into a site of material and emotional consequences: unpaid damage, pawned gifts, gambling losses, a knife attack, arrest, and Monroe’s intervention. The city that signifies liberation for Roslyn becomes, for Monroe, a place where work, marriage, celebrity, and personal loyalties converge under scrutiny. Reno’s scenes make the production itself feel precarious, while the film’s retrospective, posthumous coloring lends that precariousness the weight of memory.