The Zephyr Hotel is the Reno setting where the pressures surrounding the production of The Misfits gathered inside a temporary home. On its tenth and top floor, Marilyn Monroe and the Playwright stayed in a series of rooms; there, her inability to face the day’s work became a delay the production could not ignore. The hotel also became the base for Fleece’s brief, disorderly visit, tying Monroe’s private refuge to the costs and consequences of other people’s crises.

Setting and role in the production

The Zephyr Hotel stood in Reno, a city known in the novel as a destination for divorce. Its name came from Zephyr Cove. From a room in the hotel, the view took in sunlit streets, casino neon, and the distant Virginia Range, whose pale, color-drained appearance seemed almost like scenery. This landscape made Reno an apt setting for Roslyn’s arrival in The Misfits: she is there to divorce and free herself, while Monroe, playing her, is struggling to reach the set.

Monroe and the Playwright occupied rooms on the hotel’s tenth floor. Their marriage was already emotionally altered: she no longer loved him, while he continued to love her. The hotel therefore housed both the practical arrangements of a film production and a relationship marked by unequal feeling.

The hotel and the delayed first day

On the first day of filming, with work scheduled to begin at ten, Monroe had shut herself in the bathroom by nine, unable to face her reflection in the mirrors. She refused to open the door even when the Playwright pleaded with her and threatened to call hotel staff to remove it. She told him to leave her alone. At eleven fifteen, he went to the set in her place and apologized, offering explanations for her absence and promising she would come later.

The delay extended into the afternoon. Monroe was exhausted after a sleepless night, and the passage attributes her torpor to barbiturates. She believed she could still reach the set by mid-afternoon or early evening and hoped John Huston would understand; she regarded him as a fatherly figure who had launched her career. Meanwhile, photographers and reporters waited in the hotel lobby and outside, turning the public parts of the building into a barrier between Monroe and the set. The production could exclude journalists from filming, but not from the hotel’s shared spaces or the street.

As preparations continued, Whitey summoned Doc Fell when Monroe appeared unresponsive and was breathing with difficulty. She recovered, and Whitey began her makeup again, repeatedly calling her attention back when she seemed to drift. The film crew had already waited two hours and forty minutes; John Huston sent an assistant to check on her repeatedly, while Whitey answered that rushing would not help. The planned scene depended on Roslyn’s presence: she would drink, dance alone, embrace a tree, and draw the men’s intense attention. The hotel delay thus postponed not just Monroe’s arrival but a scene designed to make Roslyn the focus of the film’s gaze.

Fleece’s stay and departure

The hotel also accommodated Fleece after Monroe invited her to Reno as an honored guest. Fleece returned her plane ticket and traveled by Greyhound. Over three days she accumulated more than three hundred dollars in room-service charges, mostly for alcohol, and left damage that Monroe paid for. She pawned a gold Bulova watch Monroe had impulsively given her, along with hotel property, including a brass lamp shaped like a rearing horse. Monroe had also supplied a hundred-dollar gambling stake, which Fleece lost in Reno’s casinos.

Fleece never went to the set. After leaving Monroe and the Playwright during a late-night restaurant dinner, she was arrested at a casino bar on several charges, including assault with a deadly weapon. Monroe secured her release by paying one thousand dollars in bail. Fleece then disappeared from Reno, probably by Greyhound, leaving a note for Monroe under the door of her hotel room. The hotel’s rooms, doors, and shared public spaces consequently mark two contrasting forms of retreat: Monroe’s stalled effort to enter the work waiting for her, and Fleece’s abrupt exit after a visit whose financial and personal consequences fell in part on Monroe.