Here's my theory: That Miller was writing a girl character that was more or less based on Marilyn herself... and every time Marilyn read her lines she knew that Miller still didn't understand her and didn't intend to start! I think he was more interested in his perceptions of her than the woman herself, as he proved when he wrote the dubious "After The Fall" (a semi-autobiographical play that I had to read in high school for some bizarre reason). And that's the problem with sharing your life with a writer, they might create a fictional version of you in their heads, and if they're as successful as Miller, they might share it with the world! Even after you're dead!
Plus, by all accounts, the shoot of the film was miserable. The Miller's marriage was falling apart, it was blazing hot and they were mostly out in the middle of Fuck-Nowhere Nevada, Montgomery Clift was drinking his career away and was hours late for his scenes, and Clark Gable was in declining health and would die after the filming completed. Legend has it that he never complained once, and went out of his way to be kind to his troubled co-stars, but he had to have been feeling pretty awful, adding yet another layer of misery to a miserable shoot.
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