The production of The Misfits, filmed in Reno in 1961, brought Marilyn Monroe to a difficult reckoning with the camera and with the public identity that had made her famous. The shoot was marked by delays, medication, and conflict, but also by a transformation the crew repeatedly witnessed: Monroe could arrive exhausted and hours late, then draw the set into the world of Roslyn Tabor. The role became her most searching film performance and her last film, while the production’s troubles and the film’s bleak reception denied it the triumphant Hollywood farewell usually attached to a star’s work.

Reno and the role

The production unfolded at the Zephyr Hotel, where Monroe and her husband, The Playwright, occupied rooms on the tenth and top floor. Reno’s identity as a divorce capital echoed the plot: Roslyn is there to free herself through divorce. But the city’s significance was more than convenient setting. For Monroe, the part offered a chance to play a woman rather than another polished blonde commodity. Roslyn is over thirty, childless, and without the parents or former husband she longs for; her sadness about those absences carries an unmistakable resemblance to Monroe’s own history.

The production also extended a tension already present in Monroe’s relationship with photography. During an earlier nude session, Otto öse found her instinctively responsive to the camera, as though its lens offered her a more compelling mirror than human contact. The pose could turn her from a commanding figure into a vulnerable body exposed to the observer’s gaze. Later, the image known as Miss Golden Dreams circulated without her authorization; Monroe had sold the rights and negative for fifty dollars when she desperately needed money. By the time she came to Reno, she was both the object of an enormous public image and an actress trying to make the camera register something less manufactured. Roslyn gave that effort a different form: not an anonymous body on display, but a woman whose feeling had to be made legible through performance.

The first day and its delay

On the first morning of shooting, Monroe was meant to be on set at ten. At nine she had shut herself in the hotel bathroom, unable to face her frightened reflection in the mirrors. She would not open the door even when The Playwright pleaded with her, and she sent away Whitey, who had come to help. She had not slept through the night; if she had drifted off, the barbiturates still left her in a heavy, almost catatonic torpor. Her panic was not a calculated refusal to work: she was overwhelmed by emotion and unable to organize her thoughts.

The Playwright eventually went to the set without her. At eleven fifteen he apologized and offered explanations, including that Monroe had a migraine or a fever and would come that afternoon. The director agreed to shoot scenes that did not require her, while privately hoping that if she was going to collapse, she would do so before rather than during production. The set’s patience was already being tested by the gap between the scheduled start and Monroe’s uncertain arrival. From her room, however, she imagined washing her face, taking pills, dressing, and slipping out through the hotel kitchen, where she knew someone. The plan shifted as her strength returned; the imagined arrival itself began to give her energy.

Becoming Roslyn on set

Monroe eventually appeared hours late, after rumors had spread that she had been taken to a Reno hospital following a suicide attempt. She arrived with an apologetic manner, and the crew’s anger gave way to relief and welcome. Even Clark Gable, who was not pleased by the delays and had a heart condition, understood that she was suffering rather than simply behaving badly. Whitey and the rest of Monroe’s staff then worked on her face, transforming a pale, nearly unrecognizable woman into Roslyn’s angelic beauty.

The transformation was neither automatic nor permanent. Monroe could interrupt a scene and ask to begin again; she wanted many scenes repeated ten, twenty, or thirty times. The differences between takes could seem slight, yet they accumulated, and Monroe herself appeared to gather force while the other actors grew tired. She insisted on enough takes to strip away what she thought of as Norma Jeane’s protective armor and bring forward Roslyn’s tremulous, insecure, forgiving nature. On the opening scene, Roslyn speaks sadly to an older friend about her impending divorce; Monroe used the work to make the character’s fragility felt rather than merely look beautiful.

Her relationship with the director changed through this process. He had treated her condescendingly years earlier and did not initially respect her ability; he also hoped she might fail so he could replace her with a more compliant actress. Yet her late arrival and demanding repetition could not obscure what happened when she performed. The crew came to see that the person they had cursed was also a force of nature, and that the same force seemed to overtake Monroe herself. Gable, whom she revered, was among those who recognized the power of her presence. The production did not make her easy to work with, but it made the cost of dismissing her talent impossible to ignore.

The film’s cost and aftermath

The shoot ran weeks behind schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget, becoming the most expensive black-and-white film made up to that point. The scale of the overruns was attributed to Monroe, and the film received no lavish premiere: no limousine procession along Hollywood Boulevard, no cheering crowd, no reception at Grauman’s. By its release, Gable had been dead for several months and Monroe had been divorced for several months. The public celebration associated with a star’s premiere was replaced by absence and loss.

The Misfits was a box-office failure and was disliked by the studio that had produced it, despite favorable reviews and critical praise for Monroe, Gable, and Montgomery Clift. Critics recognized the film’s rough integrity, but it was treated as an unusual, artistic work rather than a conventional star vehicle. Its characters seem worn down and estranged from their famous performers: viewers see Gay Langland and wonder whether he could once have been Clark Gable, or see Roslyn Tabor and wonder whether she could once have been Marilyn Monroe. The production’s conflict between the manufactured star and the vulnerable woman thus persisted in the finished film. Roslyn’s compassion for hungry and damaged men, and her plea for the captured mustangs to be freed, made her a woman acting upon the world rather than merely offering herself to its gaze. The film’s failure as a commercial event did not erase the performance; instead, its melancholy distance from Hollywood glamour became part of what the production left behind.