Chapter Nineteen

1961

I REALLY AM TRYING TO FIND MYSELF,” she told a friendly reporter, “and the best way for me to do that is to try to prove to myself that I am an actress. And that is what I hope to do. My work is important to me. It’s the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But now I’m working on the foundation.”

Eager to forget the hardships of The Misfits and to counterpoise the end of her marriage with the beginning of a new project, Marilyn and Lee Strasberg proposed a television dramatization of Rain, the classic Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson. To her letter informing him of these plans, Maugham replied from his home on the French Riviera; touched and pleased by her desire to be his Sadie, he said she would be “splendid” and, with hearty support for the project, he sent his best wishes and admiration.

During January, negotiations for the broadcast at first proceeded smoothly. Fredric March agreed to co-star as the tortured, repressed and angry Reverend Davidson, and his wife Florence Eldridge was to play Mrs. Davidson. Contracts were almost settled with NBC, which at the time regularly offered television versions of classic dramas. But Strasberg insisted on directing, and this demand became the sticking point, for network executives were unwilling to sign him. Fervent to have Marilyn, they argued against Strasberg and for a veteran film or television director, and Marilyn was offered consultation on their choice.

But at this rejection Strasberg was furious, and with customary loyalty (and perhaps feeling she could acquit herself well under no other director) Marilyn supported her teacher. Lee, otherwise so vocal about actors finding their own ways, did not encourage her to seek another; to the contrary, he thought of Rain as their project and, on their behalf, he later canceled plans for it.

Lee also figured in Marilyn’s new will, a simple, three-page document dated January 14, 1961, that reflected her recent divorce. In it, she left $10,000 each to her half-sister, Berniece Miracle, and to May Reis, and to the Rostens she bequeathed $5,000, specifying that it be used for the education of their daughter, Patricia. Her personal effects and clothing were left to Lee Strasberg, “it being my desire that he distribute these among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted.” A trust fund in the amount of $100,000 was also established for Gladys and for Mrs. Michael Chekhov, to provide a minimum of $5,000 annually for her mother’s care and $2,500 for the latter’s. Twenty-five percent of the residual Estate was left to Marianne Kris, “to be used for the furtherance of the work of such psychiatric institutions or groups as she shall elect”; and seventy-five percent was left to Lee Strasberg.¹

There was another matter to be adjudicated more immediately: Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur. Through their lawyers, they reached a swift settlement. The Roxbury house would be Arthur’s, since it had been purchased with proceeds from the sale of his previous home, and there would be no alimonies on either side; there remained only the exchange of a few personal items. Arthur signed a waiver of his rights to contest a unilateral filing for divorce.

And so on Friday, January 20, 1961, Pat Newcomb accompanied Marilyn and her attorney, Aaron Frosch, on a swift mission to Mexico. At Pat’s suggestion, the day of Kennedy’s inauguration was deliberately chosen “because the press and the whole country would be looking at that, and we could slip away and return unnoticed,” which indeed they did. On Friday evening, the trio arrived in El Paso, Texas, crossed the border into Juárez, and before Judge Miguel Gómez Guerra Marilyn pleaded “incompatibility of character” and requested an immediate divorce. This was granted forthwith, and they were back in New York by Saturday evening. Effective Tuesday, January 24, she was no longer Mrs. Arthur Miller.

Looking tired and depressed, she was blunt with reporters. “I am upset and I don’t feel like being bothered with publicity right now,” she said on her return—but then she tried to appear cheerful, adding with a rueful smile, “but I would love to have a plate of tacos and enchiladas—we didn’t have time for food in Mexico!” She was, as Pat recalled, trying valiantly despite her evident depression over the formal termination of the marriage. At the same time, Pat knew that “at the core of her, she was really strong, much stronger than all of us—and that was something we tended to forget, because she seemed so vulnerable, and one always felt it necessary to watch out for her.”

As for her comments on Arthur Miller, Marilyn displayed her customary dignity when publicly discussing former husbands or lovers. “It would be indelicate of me to discuss this. I feel it would be trespassing,” she said. “Mr. Miller is a wonderful man and a great writer, but it didn’t work out that we should be husband and wife. But everybody I ever loved, I still love a little.” Typically, there was no bitterness, no rancor toward those from whom she felt estranged, even from those she felt had in some ways abused, demeaned or been faithless to her. Marilyn confided only in friends whose discretion she could trust: she had no desire to justify herself before the press. To show her essential goodwill, she attended the New York premiere of The Misfits at the Capitol Theater on January 31. Montgomery Clift was her escort.

*    *    *

But beneath the brave, cheerful public exterior, Marilyn’s mood was as dark as the New York winter. The Misfits, like Let’s Make Love, was not well received by most critics, and audiences were puzzled by the story and disappointed with the leading players. By February 1, after the divorce, the failure of two films, the breakdown of negotiations for Rain and no prospects for the work that always somehow sustained her despite its anxiety-provoking aspects, Marilyn was able to find consolation in nothing, and so she told Marianne Kris as well as her friends. Except for her visits to Kris, she stayed at home in her darkened bedroom, playing sentimental records, subsisting on sleeping pills and rapidly losing weight.

Her condition alarmed Marianne Kris, who suggested to Marilyn that she check into a private ward of New York Hospital for a physical workup and a good rest, with meals served and every comfort provided.

On Sunday, February 5, Kris drove Marilyn to the vast Cornell University–New York Hospital complex, overlooking the East River at Sixty-ninth Street. After freely signing her own admission papers (as “Faye Miller,” to avoid publicity), Marilyn was taken not to a typical hospital room but—as Kris had arranged—to the Payne Whitney Clinic, the psychiatric division of New York Hospital. There, to Marilyn’s horror, she was placed in a locked and padded room, one of the cells for the most disturbed patients.

Such an incarceration might cause a perfectly healthy person violent upset and panic: for Marilyn, it was as if she had at last become the heir of the mental illness she believed had bedeviled her ancestors. It had all happened so quickly, as she later told Norman Rosten, Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg, that she was pitched into a state of extreme shock. She broke down weeping and sobbing, shouting to be released and banging on the locked steel door until her fists were raw and bleeding. She was ignored, and the staff reaction was that here indeed was a psychotic case, just as her physician had attested. Her clothes and purse were removed and she was put into hospital garb and threatened with a straitjacket unless she behaved.

A young psychiatric intern, visiting her cell (it can only be called that) on Monday morning, evaluated her as “extremely disturbed,” which in a sense she was, and as “potentially self-destructive,” a judgment he made after Marilyn smashed a small window on her locked bathroom door in an effort to get to the toilet. As she told the doctor, she was upset and humiliated—not to say betrayed, as she later told her friends. But the intern merely asked repeatedly, “Why are you so unhappy?”—as if she were at a luxury resort and not confined against her will in a lunatic asylum. Quite rationally, Marilyn answered, “I’ve been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out why, and you’re asking me?” Such a logical counter is often taken as a challenge, not the sort of contradiction most professionals wish to hear.

For two days and nights, she endured this frightening situation. Marilyn, who since childhood hated locked doors and never barred her own bedroom, was almost in a state of total nervous breakdown, and from this point in her life never locked her bedroom door nor permitted a key or latch to operate it. Susan Strasberg agreed with Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan that Marilyn “always had a means of making a fast getaway even from a studio soundstage whenever she felt the walls were closing in on her. She hated to feel closed in,” at work or at home.

Finally a sympathetic nurse’s aide agreed to give her notepaper and then to deliver a message to Lee and Paula Strasberg, who received it on Wednesday, February 8:

Dear Lee and Paula,

Dr. Kris has put me in the hospital under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors. I’m locked up with these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I should be. I love you both.

Marilyn.

P.S. I’m on the dangerous floor. It’s like a cell. They had my bathroom door locked and I couldn’t get their key to get into it, so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven’t done anything that is uncooperative.

But the Strasbergs were only friends, powerless to help, much less to order or obtain Marilyn’s release. They may well have contacted Kris, who would not have provided any details of Marilyn’s condition.

When there was no reply from the Strasbergs by the morning of Thursday the ninth, Marilyn was permitted to make one telephone call. Frantic for help but managing to affect calm, she tried two or three friends but received no answer at their homes. At last she reached Joe DiMaggio in Florida.

Joe and Marilyn had not met for almost six years, but during that time she had remained in contact with his family and asked about his welfare. Since 1958, Joe held a $100,000-a-year job as a corporate vice-president for V. H. Monette, Inc., a supplier for military posts. For this company, Joe was essentially a goodwill ambassador, traveling to army bases worldwide and presiding at exhibition baseball games. During the training season, he coached the Yankees in Florida.

As for his private life, Joe had come close to marrying a woman named Marian McKnight in 1957, but this relationship ended when she was crowned Miss America; otherwise, there was no serious romance in his life. He was, according to family and friends, never out of love with Marilyn: “He carried a torch bigger than the Statue of Liberty,” according to his close friend, the Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, whose testimony was typical. “His love for her never diminished through the years.” And so it was to Joe that Marilyn now turned for help. “He loved her a great deal and they had always remained in contact,” agreed Valmore Monette.

DiMaggio arrived that evening from St. Petersburg Beach and demanded that Marilyn be released from the clinic into his custody the following day. Informed that this would have to be approved by Dr. Kris, he telephoned her and said that if Marilyn were not discharged by Friday he would (his words, according to Marilyn) “take the hospital apart brick by brick.” Kris suggested that Marilyn enter another hospital if Payne Whitney were not to her liking; Joe replied that would be discussed in due course.

Things then happened quickly.

First, to avoid even the possibility of unwelcome publicity, it was arranged for Ralph Roberts to deliver Marilyn back to Fifty-seventh Street, with Kris literally along for the ride. As Ralph recalled, Marilyn unleashed a storm of protest and criticism against her therapist, and after Marilyn was safely returned home (where Joe awaited), Ralph drove Kris back to her residence. En route, as he recalled, she was trembling with remorse, repeating over and over, “I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.” It may have been the most accurate statement of her therapeutic relationship with Marilyn; in any case, it was the last time she had anything to say, for Marianne Kris was dismissed that day and never saw Marilyn Monroe again.

Second, it was clear to Joe that, whatever her condition when she entered Payne Whitney, she was wretchedly unhappy, shaking and anorexic on her departure. She agreed to enter a far more comfortable and less threatening environment if he would stay at the hospital and be with her daily. At five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, February 10, he helped her to settle into a private room at the Neurological Institute of the Columbia University—Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center. There she remained, regaining her strength, until March 5.

For years a letter from Marilyn Monroe to Ralph Greenson was believed lost—a document providing details of Marilyn’s state of mind and feeling and her assessment of her life that winter; in 1992, it was at last discovered. The letter was written on March 1 and 2, 1961, from Columbia-Presbyterian, and the sanity, sobriety, wit and maturity of the writer are everywhere apparent. If ever there was any doubt that Marilyn Monroe at this time was a woman who, despite problems, had a clear take on her life, a native intelligence and compassion, it is forever belied by her letter.

Dear Dr. Greenson,

Just now when I looked out the hospital window where the snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a muted green. There are grass and shabby evergreen bushes, though the trees give me a little hope—and the desolate bare branches promise maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope.

Did you see “The Misfits” yet? In one sequence you can perhaps see how bare and strange a tree can be for me. I don’t know if it comes across that way for sure on the screen—I don’t like some of the selections in the takes they used. As I started to write this letter about four quiet tears had fallen. I don’t know quite why.

Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me—it all seems like one long, long horrible day. Anyway, I thought I’d try to be constructive about it and started to read the letters of Sigmund Freud. When I first opened the book I saw the picture of Freud inside, opposite the title page and I burst into tears—he looked very depressed (the picture must have been taken near the end of his life), as if he died a disappointed man. But Dr. Kris said he had much physical pain which I had known from the Jones book. I know this, too, to be so, but still I trust my instincts because I see a sad disappointment in his gentle face. The book reveals (though I am not sure anyone’s love letters should be published) that he wasn’t a stiff! I mean his gentle, sad humor and even a striving was eternal in him. I haven’t gotten very far yet because at the same time I’m reading Sean O’Casey’s first autobiography. This book disturbs me very much, and in a way one should be disturbed for these things, after all.

There was no empathy at Payne Whitney—it had a very bad effect on me. They put me in a cell (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed, depressed patients, except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn’t happy there (everything was under lock and key, things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows—and the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time. Also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients). I answered: “Well, I’d have to be nuts if I like it here!” Then there were screaming women in their cells—I mean, they screamed out when life was unbearable for them, I guess—and at times like this I felt an available psychiatrist should have talked to them, perhaps to alleviate even temporarily their misery and pain. I think they (the doctors) might learn something, even—but they are interested only in something they studied in books. Maybe from some life-suffering human being they could discover more—I had the feeling they looked more for discipline and that they let their patients go after the patients have “given up.” They asked me to mingle with the patients, to go out to O.T. (Occupational Therapy). I said, “And do what?” They said: “You could sew or play checkers, even cards, and maybe knit.” I tried to explain that the day I did that they would have a nut on their hands. These things were farthest from my mind. They asked me why I felt I was “different” from the other patients, so I decided if they were really that stupid I must give them a very simple answer, so I said, “I just am.”

The first day I did mingle with a patient. She asked me why I looked so sad and suggested I could call a friend and perhaps not be so lonely. I told her that they had told me that there wasn’t a phone on that floor. Speaking of floors, they are all locked—no one could go in and no one could go out. She looked shocked and shaken and said, “I’ll take you to the phone”—and while I waited in line for my turn for the use of the phone, I observed a guard (since he had on a gray knit uniform), and as I approached the phone he straight-armed the phone and said very sternly, “You can’t use the phone.” By the way, they pride themselves in having a home-like atmosphere there. I asked them (the doctors) how they figured that. They answered, “Well, on the sixth floor we have wall-to-wall carpeting and modern furniture,” to which I replied, “Well, that any good interior decorator could provide—providing there are funds for it,” but since they are dealing with human beings, I asked, why couldn’t they perceive the interior of a human being?

The girl that told me about the phone seemed such a pathetic and vague creature. She told me after the straight-arming, “I didn’t know they would do that.” Then she said, “I’m here because of my mental condition—I have cut my throat several times and slashed my wrists,” she said either three or four times.

Oh, well, men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart. Still, one can change them but won’t—by the way, that was the original theme of The Misfits—no one even caught that part of it. Partly because, I guess, the changes in the script and some of the distortions in the direction.

Later:

I know I will never be happy but I know I can be gay!

Remember I told you Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew and believe me, he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with Lee Strasberg.

Was it Milton who wrote: “The happy ones were never born,”? I know at least two psychiatrists who are looking for a more positive approach.

This morning, March 2:

I didn’t sleep again last night. I forgot to tell you something yesterday. When they put me into the first room on the sixth floor I was not told it was a psychiatric floor. Dr. Kris said she was coming the next day. The nurse came in after the doctor, a psychiatrist, had given me a physical examination including examining the breast for lumps. I took exception to this but not violently, only explaining that the medical doctor who had put me there, a stupid man named Dr. Lipkin, had already done a complete physical less than thirty days before. But when the nurse came in, I noticed there was no way of buzzing or reaching for a light to call the nurse. I asked why this was and some other things, and she said this is a psychiatric floor. After she went out I got dressed and then was when the girl in the hall told me about the phone. I was waiting at the elevator door which looks like all other doors with a door-knob except it doesn’t have any numbers (you see, they left them all out). After the girl spoke with me and told me what she had done to herself, I went back into my room knowing they had lied to me about the telephone and I sat on the bed trying to figure that if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation, what would I do? So I figured, it’s a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak, but I got the idea from a movie I made once called Don’t Bother to Knock. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it against the glass, intentionally—and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass, so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them, “If you are going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.” I admit the next thing is corny, but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn’t let me out I would harm myself—the farthest thing from my mind at the moment, since you know, Dr. Greenson, I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself, I’m just that vain. I didn’t cooperate with them in any way because I couldn’t believe in what they were doing. They asked me to go quietly and I refused to move, staying on the bed so they picked me up by all fours, two hefty men and two hefty women and carried me up to the seventh floor in the elevator. I must say at least they had the decency to carry me face down. I just wept quietly all the way there and then was put in the cell I told you about and that ox of a woman, one of those hefty ones, said, “Take a bath.” I told her I had just taken one on the sixth floor. She said very sternly, “As soon as you change floors, you have to take another bath.” The man who runs that place, a high-school principal type, although Dr. Kris refers to him as an “administrator,” he was actually permitted to talk to me, questioning me somewhat like an analyst. He told me I was a very, very sick girl and had been a very, very sick girl for many years. He looks down on his patients. He asked me how I could possibly work when I was depressed. He wondered if that interfered with my work. He was being very firm and definite in the way he said it. He actually stated it more than he questioned me, so I replied, “Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when they worked sometimes?” It’s like saying a ball player like DiMaggio couldn’t hit a ball when he was depressed. Pretty silly.

By the way, I have some good news, sort of, since I guess I helped. He claims I did: Joe said I saved his life by sending him to a psychotherapist. Dr. Kris said that he is a very brilliant man, the doctor. Joe said he pulled himself by his own bootstraps after the divorce but he told me also that if he had been me he would have divorced him, too. Christmas night he sent a forest-full of poinsettias. I asked who they were from since it was such a surprise—my friend Pat Newcomb was there and they had just arrived then. She said, “I don’t know, the card just says, ‘Best, Joe.’ ” Then I replied, “Well, there’s only one Joe.” Because it was Christmas night I called him up and asked him why he had sent me the flowers. He said, “First of all, because I thought you would call me to thank me,” and then he said, “Besides, who in the hell else do you have in the world?” He asked me to have a drink some time with him. I said I knew he didn’t drink, but he said occasionally now he takes a drink, to which I replied then it would have to be a very, very dark place! He asked me what I was doing Christmas night. I said nothing, I’m here with a friend. Then he asked me to come over and I was glad he was coming, though I must say I was bleary and depressed, but somehow still glad he was coming over.

I think I had better stop because you have other things to do, but thanks for listening for a while.

Marilyn M.

Joe visited her every day at the hospital, and before her release he went ahead to Florida, whence she had agreed to join him for a few weeks’ rest.

On March 5, Marilyn left Columbia-Presbyterian after a twenty-three-day rest and rehabilitation. Six security guards escorted her through a mob of four hundred fans and dozens of photographers and reporters crowding round the hospital entrance; present to help were May Reis (still willing to be helpful in such circumstances), Pat Newcomb and her colleague John Springer, from the New York office of Arthur Jacobs. “I feel wonderful,” she said. “I had a nice rest.” Smiling “as radiantly as an Oscar winner” (thus one reporter on the scene), Marilyn also appeared healthier than ever: she had lost most of the fifteen pounds she had gained during the unhappy summer of 1960 and sported an elegantly casual new champagne-colored coiffure that matched her beige cashmere sweater and skirt and her identically dyed shoes.

Three days later, she attended the funeral of Arthur’s mother at a Brooklyn funeral chapel, where she comforted her former father-in-law and offered condolences to Arthur. “She had just been discharged from the hospital,” Isadore Miller told a writer later, “and I was about to enter one myself. When I did, she called me every day after my operation, wiring flowers and phoning my doctor.” Their affection was unaltered by the divorce from Arthur.

By the end of March, Marilyn was with Joe, who left the Yankees in St. Petersburg and took her to a secluded resort in Redington Beach, Florida. Here they relaxed, swam, combed the shore for shells, dined quietly and retired early. Once or twice, they drove to St. Petersburg and watched the Yankees train, and Marilyn thrilled the team simply by being there and cheering them on; Joe was very proud of her indeed. Said his friend Jerry Coleman, “Joe DiMaggio deeply loved that woman”—an attachment that was quickly becoming mutual once again. Lois Smith: “The attraction to Joe remained great. Marilyn knew where she stood with him. He was always there, she could always call on him, lean on him, depend on him, be certain of him. It was a marvelous feeling of comfort for her.” DiMaggio was, as Pat Newcomb said years later about that year, “a hero. Marilyn could always call on Ralph, who was generous with his time and the best friend she ever had. But Joe had the power to come to get her released from the hospital.”

At the end of April, Marilyn was back in Los Angeles and feeling so well (except for a nagging pain in her stomach and right side) that she told columnists and friends she would soon be back at work on a new film, although what that might be she had no idea. At first she accepted an offer to live briefly at the home of Frank Sinatra, who was away on a European tour; then Marilyn contacted Jane Ziegler, the daughter of Viola Mertz, her former landlady at 882 North Doheny Drive at the corner of Cynthia Street. As it happened, an apartment had just become available in this same complex where she had rented in 1952. Marilyn moved in some hastily bought furniture—bookcases, a large bed she put in the living room and a vanity table and wardrobe in the small bedroom.

Visitors like Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg saw that the place could have been a hotel room: it lacked personal touches, there were no photographs or awards, merely a few books, a suitcase of clothes and a makeup box. The apartment seemed to be merely a base from which she would dash out to a waiting limousine for errands, for visits to Dr. Greenson or Dr. Engelberg, or for meetings with an agent, a publicist, screenwriter or producer. As sensitive as ever to ambient noise, Marilyn depended on Nembutal to sleep.

In May, she was happy to receive from Clark Gable’s widow an invitation to attend the christening of the baby John Clark; this was a reunion that killed the occasional rumor that Kay Gable believed Marilyn’s tardiness was the cause of her husband’s death. Then, within days of that happy event, she was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn again operated to relieve her agonizing, chronic endometriosis.

Back home by June 1, she dined with a few friends on her thirty-fifth birthday and met with a London reporter. “I’m very happy to have reached this age,” she said. “I feel I’m growing up. It was wonderful being a girl, but it’s more wonderful being a woman.” On June 7, she attended a party in Las Vegas, given by Frank Sinatra for Dean Martin’s forty-fourth birthday; also present were (among others) Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Eddie Fisher.

The reason for her presence was simple. It is unclear exactly when Marilyn began a brief, intermittent romance with Frank Sinatra (perhaps as early as two or three rendezvous in 1955 in New York), but the liaison was resumed that June and lasted until late that year. Frank, apparently the more smitten, met Marilyn at his home in Los Angeles, and occasionally in Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe.

“There’s no doubt that Frank was in love with Marilyn,” said the producer Milton Ebbins, who knew them both well that year. Ebbins, a friend of Sinatra and vice-president of Peter Lawford’s production company, recalled an incident that revealed Sinatra’s infatuation for Monroe. After accepting an invitation to a luncheon for President Kennedy at the oceanfront home of Lawford (who was then married to the president’s sister Patricia), Sinatra failed to arrive.

“He has a terrible cold,” said his secretary Gloria Lovell, telephoning the singer’s last-minute excuse. (By coincidence, Lovell lived in the same apartment complex as Marilyn.)

“Oh, Gloria, come on, this is hard to believe,” replied Ebbins, who took the call. “Tell him he’s got to come. He can’t do this to the president!” But the secretary was adamant: Sinatra would not appear. Later, Ebbins learned from Lovell and from Sinatra himself the real reason for the astonishing absence: “He couldn’t find Marilyn!” Ebbins recalled. “She had been staying at his house for a weekend, and she had gone out for something—shopping or a facial or whatever—and he couldn’t find her! It wasn’t worry for her safety, he was just that jealous of her whereabouts! To hell with the president’s lunch!”

Marilyn resented this proprietary attitude. She liked and admired Frank and felt safe in his company. She would not, however, be possessed by him, for by 1961 Joe really had no competition; Marilyn also knew that despite their involvement Frank followed his own romantic inclinations elsewhere. “I think he might have married Marilyn if he had the chance,” according to Ebbins. “After all, for Frank to break an engagement with the president of the United States—and I can assure you how badly he wanted to go there—that was a major thing for him! He could have come to the lunch, departed and found her later. I tell you, he was hung up on this girl!” Rupert Allan, Ralph Roberts and Joseph Naar (a close friend and agent-manager for Lawford) also knew of Sinatra’s deep feelings for Marilyn.

But for all that the rumor mills and columnists have over the years made of this relationship, it was, after 1961, essentially a friendship: Marilyn’s man was Joe, and it was well known that Frank was involved with, among others, the actress Juliet Prowse.

Throughout that spring, the chronic pain in Marilyn’s right side had become sharper, along with more frequent bouts of indigestion. During the third week of June, she asked Ralph Roberts to accompany her to New York, where on June 28, in agony with digestive-tract illness, she entered the Manhattan Polyclinic on West Fiftieth Street—her fifth admission to a hospital in ten months. Doctors diagnosed impacted gallstones and an acutely inflamed gallbladder, the cause of her chronic pain and “indigestion,” which often (as typical of the condition) troubled her at night and unfortunately led her to take more barbiturates.

On June 29, a successful, two-hour cholecystectomy was performed; back in her room after the operation, Marilyn awakened to see Joe, who had been with her during admission and right up to the time she was wheeled away for surgery. He was with her daily for a week, until family business took him to San Francisco; then, from August to November, he was away on foreign business with Monette. Marilyn remained in constant contact with him.

On July 11, after receiving a new hairdo from the famous New York stylist Mr. Kenneth, Marilyn left the hospital. Outside, two hundred fans and a hundred reporters and photographers awaited, crushing around with questions, requests for autographs—and trying to touch her, to tug at her sweater, to be as close as possible to the most photographed woman in the world. “It was scary,” she said later.

I felt for a few minutes as if they were just going to take pieces out of me. Actually it made me feel a little sick. I mean I appreciated the concern and their affection and all that, but—I don’t know—it was a little like a nightmare. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into that car safely and get away!

Pat Newcomb arrived from Los Angeles to help, bringing along the bouncy little gift of a puppy. Marilyn was delighted, saying, “I think I’ll call him Maf Honey, in honor of Frank”—a joke referring to Sinatra’s alleged friendships with shady characters.

That month, Marilyn and Ralph drove to the Miller home in Roxbury, where she retrieved a few final possessions. He recalled that day—Marilyn holding an old winter topcoat close to her face and saying, rather like Mama Bear expecting to find Goldilocks, “He’s been with a woman who wears another kind of perfume and who has been wearing my coat,” which Marilyn forthwith tossed into a trashcan. (The woman was, as they both knew, Inge Morath, soon to become the third Mrs. Arthur Miller.)

Later, Marilyn told Norman Rosten,

I told [Arthur] when I’d be there, but when I arrived he wasn’t. It was sad. I thought maybe he’d ask me in for coffee or something. We spent some happy years in that house. But he was away, and then I thought, “Maybe he’s right, what’s over is over, why torment yourself with hellos?” Still, it would have been polite, sort of, don’t you think, if he’d been there to greet me? Even a little smile would do.

There was, however, a warmer moment with someone else from Marilyn’s past, although one not quite so familiar. Her half-sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, was in New York for a visit, and on a second retrieval mission to Roxbury she accompanied Ralph and Marilyn. This was perhaps the third time in their lives the women had met, and there was little for them to discuss or to share. But Marilyn was genial and complimentary to Berniece, as Ralph remembered: “Just look at her lovely hair, that beautiful red color—it’s just like our mother’s.”

*    *    *

In early August, Marilyn decided to return to Los Angeles. Unable to find a New York psychiatrist she liked and unwilling to consider a return to Marianne Kris, she settled on Greenson for permanent therapy. While Marilyn traveled by airplane to California, she asked Ralph Roberts to drive cross-country with his car, so that over the next few months he could be her companion, chauffeur (driving was still awkward after her surgery) and masseur. This position he was glad to undertake for so close a friend. She leased a room for him at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, less than ten minutes away from Doheny Drive, and they were together (like the most devoted siblings, as Pat and Susan put it) every day from August to November. Ralph helped Marilyn resettle in her apartment; they shopped; he delivered her for facials at Madame Renna’s, on Sunset Boulevard; he drove her to Greenson’s home for sessions every afternoon at four; and most evenings they barbecued supper on the terrace at Doheny. She called him “The Brother.”²

Among Marilyn’s first requests was that Ralph help to install heavy curtains, similar to those she had in the Beverly Glen house in 1956—blackout fabric extending almost the entire width of the wall to assure a complete blockage of light.

Marilyn was, according to Ralph, trying to take things slowly at first; her health and stamina returned, and she seemed happy and optimistic. But Ralph, Pat, Susan Strasberg, Allan Snyder and, on his occasional visits to Los Angeles, Rupert Allan noticed that the more deeply Marilyn entered into her psychotherapy, the more miserable she became. “At first she adored Greenson,” Roberts recalled,

but it did not seem to any of us that he was good for her. He began to exert more and more control over her life, dictating who she should have for friends, whom she might visit and so forth. But she felt it was necessary to obey.

Marilyn’s relationship with her therapist became, during the last year of her life, painfully tangled and complex. By October, Greenson was regularly canceling appointments with other patients at his Roxbury Drive office and rushing home to meet privately with Marilyn. In November, she often stayed after her session for a glass of champagne with his family—forever obliterating her anonymity as a patient and accepting an intimacy that Greenson offered with monumentally inappropriate nonchalance. Soon she was staying for dinner, sometimes three or four times weekly. Ralph Roberts, who arrived promptly after her hour to return her to Doheny Drive, was more and more frequently dismissed by Greenson, and one or another of the family drove Marilyn home later in the evening. The doctor was, as his wife had mentioned in another context, making a patient “a member of his family,” and thus fulfilling “his foster-home fantasy of a haven where all hurts are mended.”

But what may have sprung from honorable motives also revealed Greenson’s own weakness and had profoundly deleterious effects on his patient, himself and his family: he was swiftly becoming the classic case of the therapist who himself would have benefited from expert counseling. Instead of providing the techniques for Marilyn to find within herself new resources for independence and autonomous judgment, he made her more dependent, ensuring his own dominance. And because he gave her the signal to do so, Marilyn began relying on his family, telephoning the Greenson residence at any hour to discuss her dreams, her fears, her hesitation about this script or that appointment and the vagaries of one relationship or another. Treated and addressed like a family member, she acted more and more like one, presuming access at any time and asking Joan Greenson to transport her here and there when Ralph was otherwise engaged. “He overstepped the usual patient-doctor boundaries,” as his colleague and friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Litman, said. “I do not suggest there was anything improper in the relationship, but there was certainly a danger in getting so involved in adopting her and putting her into his family. This put him in an impossible situation.”

Joan and her brother Daniel (both of them college students at the time) knew their father was a strict Freudian, but Greenson told them and his wife that he believed traditional therapy would not be effective in Marilyn’s case, that she needed the example of a stable family in order to find one for herself. He found her, he told them, so charming and so vulnerable that only he could save her. Of this overt savior complex any professional colleague would sternly disapprove.

As for Marilyn, this heightened relationship—which she was in no position to contradict—was at first flattering and satisfying. But Greenson could not replace her need to work, to do something as an actress, and without the compensations of creative activity, she fell into a depression. That season, she sent to Norman Rosten a lyric expressing her mood of dark doubt for the course of her inner life:

Help Help

Help I feel life coming closer

When all I want is to die.

A part of her, as she told her best friends, rejected the stifling manipulation of her psychotherapeutic situation—but she felt more and more dependent.

Marilyn’s complete absorption into the orbit of Greenson’s life continued uninterrupted, and on a Saturday afternoon in late November, the doctor took a remarkably selfish step. Asking Marilyn to come to his home for two sessions in one day, he sent her back to Ralph Roberts, who was waiting in the car at curbside. She was, as Roberts could never forget, deeply upset and weeping. “Dr. Greenson,” she said, “thinks you should go back to New York. He has chosen someone else to be a companion for me. He said that two Ralphs in my life are one too many. I told him I call you Rafe. ‘He’s Rafe!’ I said, over and over. But he says no—that I need someone else.”

Without argument, Roberts came to the apartment the next afternoon to collect the massage table he used each night for Marilyn. Gloria Lovell told him she had heard Marilyn weeping throughout the night, that she longed for her friend to remain. In thrall to Greenson, she had no courage or recourse to withstand this extraordinary imposition and rupture of a good and beneficial friendship. Marilyn Monroe’s life was not becoming wider and more open to growth, but narrower, more dependent and childish. “She began to get rid of a lot of people around her who only took advantage of her,” wrote Greenson of this time in Marilyn’s life.

The following day, before departing for New York, Roberts came to say farewell to his friend, but he could not rouse her from sleep after ringing for five minutes. Untangling a garden hose, he made as if to water the shrubbery, flowers and plants and then deliberately splashed her apartment. Marilyn pulled back the curtain, opened a window and said, “I know what you’re thinking, but everything’s all right.” Yes, she said, she was groggy from too many sleeping pills. But there was a reason. The residents of a nearby house had a wild party the night before, and knowing of their famous neighbor they stood under her window and shouted her name, calling her to join them.

Marilyn never knew the name of the woman who had led this group, nor did they ever meet; she was a former bit-part actress who sometimes used the name Jeanne Carmen. Like Robert Slatzer, Carmen emerged from obscurity many years later to transmute her geographic proximity to Marilyn Monroe into something of a career. Claiming that she was Marilyn’s roommate at Doheny Drive, she began, in the 1980s, to invent an imaginative series of scurrilous tales for which there is simply no basis in fact: a wild romance between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, for example, including indiscreet assignations, joyrides to Malibu beaches and nude swims.

Like that of Slatzer, however, Carmen’s name is nowhere to be found in Marilyn’s address books, nor did anyone who knew Marilyn ever hear of or see (much less meet or know) her. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a singer, close friend of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope and the daughter of a Los Angeles County under-sheriff, was a frequent visitor to her friend Gloria Lovell, who lived across the breeze way from Marilyn and dined several times weekly with her. “I never heard of anyone named Jeanne Carmen,” said Betsy. “I know she never lived in that complex, because Gloria and I certainly would have known her, just as we would have known if Marilyn had a roommate.”

But Marilyn’s difficulties were just beginning. Also in November, she was summoned for discussions at her old studio, where she had contractual obligations to fulfill: two films, to be specific, at $100,000 salary per picture. Marilyn was not the only bankable Hollywood star to be embittered by the much-trumpeted news that Elizabeth Taylor was to receive ten times that amount for a Fox epic called Cleopatra which (as everyone also knew) was in a financial and artistic pickle—first at the London production facilities and then in Rome, where its budget had risen to the then comical sum of thirty million dollars, plunging Fox to the brink of bankruptcy. By this time, Cleopatra was almost a metaphor for the studio itself, where astounding chaos prevailed.

The company’s problems had, indeed, been escalating for years and may be briefly outlined. Buddy Adler had been production chief since 1956, after Darryl F. Zanuck retreated to Europe to work as an independent producer releasing through the studio. An effective and admired executive, Adler died in 1960, at fifty-one. At this crucial time, Fox was reeling from the advance of television, the decline of the old studio system (and the end of the old seven-year contract), the beginning of wildly inflated salaries (Taylor was a case in point) and an array of nasty power struggles within the executive boards of Fox in Los Angeles and New York.

Also at this time, blame for the unprecedented costs of Cleopatra was laid at the feet of studio president Spyros Skouras, who was “demoted upward,” as it were, from president to chairman of the board. The vacuum of power was filled, on orders from Fox’s New York-based committee of financiers, by a man named Robert Goldstein, who was not especially familiar with the fine points of film production. “You must have a death wish,” said executive vice-president David Brown candidly to Skouras, who had asked his opinion about this choice. Brown’s reply was subsequently reported (by Skouras or some meddler) to Goldstein. “Not long after,” as Brown added, “I was at once booted out of the executive vice-presidency for creative operations and my position as a director of the parent company, and suddenly I was a producer!”³

The chaos continued, with reversal following comic reversal: Hollywood sometimes resembles its own best silent two-reel comedies.

First, Fox’s board assigned two outside financial experts, John Loeb and Milton Gould, to investigate the company’s problems. According to Gould, they traveled from New York to Hollywood, found the studio “in a shambles, and immediately got Goldstein dismissed.” Although he admitted that he had absolutely no expertise in the business of moviemaking (“My job was to stop the mismanagement of money”), Gould replaced Goldstein with a new executive vice-president in charge of production.

This new man was Peter G. Levathes, an intelligent and sophisticated attorney, once a Skouras assistant and then, after the war, head of the television department at Young & Rubicam advertising agency in New York. Unaccustomed to the techniques, traditions, demands, details and temperaments of film studio productions, Levathes was an energetic and benevolent man, but perhaps not the wisest choice to head a studio with a twenty-two-million-dollar debt. He was, according to director Jean Negulesco, “a tall, dark man, nervous and with the far-away look of a man with responsibilities beyond his understanding or ability.”

By this time, David Brown was at work on Marilyn’s new picture, for which he had brought in writer Arnold Shulman to work on a revision of the popular 1940 comedy My Favorite Wife, which had starred Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. In the new version, Marilyn (as Ellen Arden), married and the mother of two babies, is seduced by the boss of her husband, Nick, a swiftly rising young businessman. Failing this rather sordid little “fidelity test,” she believes she has ruined Nick’s chances for success, and, humiliated, she flees to Hawaii and the Far East. But Ellen misses the connecting flight from Honolulu to Japan—a lucky mistake, for that airplane goes down in the Pacific. She is reported dead but remains in Hawaii for five years, until longing for her children and the collapse of an affair encourage her to return home. But at this very time, Nick has had her declared legally dead and has just remarried.⁴

From the start, Marilyn did not want to do this picture, “but Dr. Greenson said it would be good for me,” as she reported to Ralph Roberts. Brown, borrowing a song from a Fred Astaire film, quickly settled on the film’s title: Something’s Got to Give. In addition, he engaged George Cukor, who also owed Fox a picture; despite the manifold problems on Let’s Make Love, Marilyn and George had parted as friends and she approved the choice of him. But very soon Cukor saw danger signals.

First of all, the scenario was an almost insurmountable challenge, both in construction and character credibility: how, for example, could the comic, the sexual and the sentimental aspects of this story be updated and balanced? As autumn passed, even a sharp and witty writer like Shulman was stymied—by the project as well as by the accumulation of corporate problems at Fox. “There was nothing they could do right with this thing from the start,” Shulman recalled years later, adding that it was clear to him (as it was also to David Brown and others) that both the film and Marilyn were to be the targets of blame for an increasing series of management blunders. That winter, Shulman was succeeded by Nunnally Johnson, who had written and produced We’re Not Married andHow To Marry a Millionaire.

“Have you been trapped into this, too?” Marilyn asked Johnson when they met for a script conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As they discussed the problems with the scenario, he found that she was “quick, she was gay, she probed into certain aspects of the story with the sharpest perception.”

At the same time, David Brown was replaced by an unlikely and yet, from one viewpoint, an entirely logical candidate. “Richard Zanuck called me one day,” Brown recalled, “and reported that he had just been in an elevator with a man who was carrying the script-in-progress for Something’s Got to Give. I’m worried,’ Dick said. I was, too.”

Henry Weinstein, a New York producer of the Play of the Week television series and an associate producer for the Theatre Guild, had only recently been hired by Fox—“and Weinstein [thus David Brown] was the studio’s instrument to remove me as producer from Marilyn’s picture.” The decision was made unilaterally by Levathes, who cabled Spyros Skouras in New York on January 10: “The change will become effective this week as discreetly as possible.” Weinstein’s appointment to the job had also been championed by none other than Ralph Greenson, who was much admired by the young producer, who knew the psychiatrist socially. Reflecting after the fact, Levathes realized years later “how much Weinstein and Greenson seemed to need each other.”

“Her therapist said it would be better if Marilyn had someone who understood her and could deal with her, so Henry got the job,” recalled David Brown. “His appointment made no one very happy. George Cukor, for example, threw an ink bottle at poor Henry on first meeting.” As for Greenson, he obtained for himself a position on the picture as special consultant and counselor to Marilyn Monroe—not for a large fee, but, to be sure, for a satisfying charge to his ego. This was the closest he came, after his dramatic lecture presentations onstage, to achieving relative stardom.

Everything was spinning out of control, as Nunnally Johnson recalled: “there was no one at the studio with the strength or intelligence to call a halt to this idiocy.” While he wrote and preproduction began on Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn turned to the occupation that so often encouraged her: studio photography. Twenty-seven-year-old Douglas Kirkland, then a bright young photographer who would soon be established as one of the finest in his profession, was on the staff of Look magazine, then preparing a special quarter-century issue. Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Shirley MacLaine had been photographed, and Marilyn agreed to a session in November.

Douglas Kirkland met Marilyn Monroe three times and, as he recalled years later, he saw “essentially a different person each time I met her.” First, he and two colleagues met Marilyn at her apartment. “She seemed,” he recalled, “to be paranoid about her privacy, and we were all made to vow we would never divulge where she lived.” Apart from that, he found a cheerful, easygoing woman with no star complex, speaking animatedly and eager to cooperate with the project.

Their next meeting, two days later, was for the shooting session at a photographer’s studio, which began at nine in the evening. Kirkland vividly recalled that she seemed “very white, almost luminescent—this white vision drifted as if in slow motion into the studio. She seemed to give off a glow.” As they had agreed, Marilyn slipped into a bed with silk sheets, then discarded her robe and, from above, Kirkland began to take his pictures. But then she said, “Let’s stop for a minute,” and, turning to the crew—several assistants to herself and Kirkland and some people from Look—she said, “I want everybody to leave. I think I should be alone with this boy. I find it works better that way.”

There was, as he remembered, an extraordinary sexual tension in the room. Kirkland snapped his photos, Marilyn seduced the camera, turned, sat forward, leaned backward. And then she asked him to come down from the gallery above and to sit on the bed with her. Kirkland, married and father of two, continued to work “even while she was teasing, toying with me, making it very clear what she meant and what she was offering.” After the last photo, he shared a glass of champagne with her, and their colleagues rejoined them.

“This glowing-white woman in white silk sheets had enjoyed playing this game,” recalled Kirkland, “and even though nothing happened between us, for her something had.” It was just as André de Dienes, Phillipe Halsman, Milton Greene and every photographer had learned: the camera lens was not an inert glass eye, but the eyes of millions. The ultimate sex object, she responded to its stimulative power, it aroused her, and—as the entire impact of her personality was directed at that lens—she ineluctably invited the man present and the men absent.

Their third meeting took place back at Marilyn’s apartment two days later, when Kirkland returned with the proofs. She wore a scarf on her head, and dark glasses. Alone, she was irritable and aloof and, after some delays, selected ten images she approved; those she rejected she cut up with scissors. Of the one she most preferred, Marilyn said, “To me, this is the kind of girl a truck driver would like to be in there with, in those white sheets.” A certain blue-collar appeal, he sensed, was what Marilyn sought: the presentation of a woman for the average working man, not the aristocrat. “If I am a star,” she said soon after, “it was the people who made me one—not the studio, but the people.” From their last meeting, Kirkland kept forever the image of a troubled woman who was also a consummate professional.

That Marilyn was alternately cheerful and troubled had a foundation Douglas Kirkland could not have known.

Spending so many hours at the Greenson home on Franklin Street, Marilyn came to appreciate its Spanish colonial charm—the stucco walls, the balconies, the profusion of hand-painted Mexican tiles, the beamed cathedral-ceiling living room, the homey kitchen. At this house she dined often after her therapy; here she taught Joan to dance, and here she attended Greenson’s evening musicales. Her love for the house and her virtual part-time residence there led Greenson to suggest that Marilyn look to purchase a similar home of her own—nearby. To this idea she was lukewarm, as she was to the idea of the new Fox project. But by this time Greenson was making the decisions. “I encouraged her to buy the house,” he said later. “She said she had no interest in remaining in California or making it her residence. She said that after her next picture she would go back to New York, which she considered her permanent home.”

But that statement he made in 1966. In 1961, the task of helping Marilyn find the right house fell to the woman who was engaged as her new companion, replacing in Marilyn’s life (so the doctor intended) the devoted Ralph Roberts.

Greenson had told Marilyn to hire Eunice Murray, then fifty-nine, the same woman who had sold her home to him fourteen years before. “The doctor thought the house would take the place of a baby or a husband, and that it would protect her,” according to Eunice, who was perhaps unaware of the impudence and imprudence of such an idea. But this was not the worst of the matter. In Marilyn Monroe’s submission to Eunice Murray—there can be no other noun to describe their relationship—Ralph Greenson made perhaps the unwisest choice of his life. Even his wife (not to say every one of Marilyn’s friends and colleagues who subsequently met Eunice) described Eunice as one of the strangest creatures in their experience. But from the end of 1961, Marilyn spent very few nights without Eunice Murray nearby: when she had time off, Greenson brought Marilyn to live with his family again, because, he believed, “there was nobody else around whom I could trust.” This is among the oddest of Greenson’s odd remarks, but “there was nobody else” but Eunice who was so willing to do his bidding with regard to Marilyn Monroe.

The second of two girls, Eunice Joerndt was born in Chicago in March 1902, and when she was very young, her parents—devout members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect—moved to rural Ohio. An outwardly docile and sweet child, Eunice attended country grade school and at fifteen she was sent off to the Urbana School and Academy (in Urbana, Ohio), an institution steeped in the tradition of the Swedenborgian religion. Here her sister Carolyn, four years older than Eunice, was already residing. The following year, the school roster lists Los Angeles as Eunice’s home address and Chicago as Carolyn’s.

This discrepancy is easily explained. Contacted at their new home in Los Angeles, the parents were told that Carolyn was ill with Spanish influenza and had been put under a physician’s care. Enraged at this flagrant defiance of their religious prohibition against medical care, the Joerndts legally disowned Carolyn, who thenceforth ceased to exist for them. When this unhappy news arrived, a school house-mother temporarily looked after Carolyn.

Eunice escaped the flu and virtual orphanhood. But she adored her sister, considering herself (as she said) Carolyn’s “mere shadow.” She was also deeply affected by her parents’ violent reaction, and from this time, and with good reason, she began to suffer subtle but distinct signs of emotional disturbance—primarily an inability to differentiate her life from that of her sister’s and other contemporaries, and an almost paralyzing terror of being abandoned. Her formal education ended in 1918, before her sixteenth birthday, apparently because of her emotional and psychological frailty.

The influence of the Swedenborgian religion on the Joerndt girls at Urbana Academy cannot be overestimated. Urged to imitate their founder (the eighteenth-century Swedish scholar, scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg), the forty students were urged “constantly to engage in thought about God, salvation and the spiritual diseases of men” while undergoing “instruction in arts and morals.” Set before them as the sublimest goal was marriage, which they believed continued in eternity.

The sisters’ close alliance persisted, and in early 1924 they both announced their engagements. Grateful for the benevolence offered by the Urbana community and devoted to the principles of Swedenborgianism, Carolyn married Franklin Blackmer, a prominent Swedenborgian minister who served for six years as president of Urbana College. Carolyn herself had taught there from 1921 to her wedding day, and she was a powerful force in the college’s life until her death in 1972—despite the retirement of her husband, a “controversial, alienating man,” as the college’s historian candidly described him.

Continuing to identify with her sister, who that year married Reverend Blackmer, Eunice married John Murray, a World War veteran and the son of an equally prominent Swedenborgian minister named Walter Brown Murray. John planned to enter the ministry too, and to that end he attended the Yale Divinity School. But he quit the seminary, was never ordained and turned instead to his first love, carpentry, which Eunice took for an imitation of the Lord Jesus Himself. John Murray eventually rose to become vice-president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

Carolyn Joerndt Blackmer devoted her entire life to Swedenborgianism, Urbana, her husband and the little nursery school she opened on campus in 1929, which expressed her love of children and her desire for good early education. By that time, Eunice and John were beginning their own family and eventually had three daughters, named Jacquelyn, Patricia and Marilyn. Although Eunice’s lack of education prevented her from becoming a teacher, she imitated further her adored sister, even to the point of calling herself a “child nurse” or even, more boldly, a “nurse”—a designation she continued to assume during her later life in Los Angeles, where she listed herself in telephone directories as an educated, trained professional (indeed, a “shadow” of Carolyn). Lacking any training or credentials other than the normal school of motherhood, Eunice throughout her life admired her sister Carolyn and her brother-in-law Franklin Blackmer to the point of idolatry; indeed, after the death of Carolyn she married Franklin, who died within the year. Eunice Joerndt Murray Blackmer’s life, it appears, might have served as the true-life basis of a minor nineteenth-century Gothic romance.

Eunice and John Murray’s marriage was frankly troubled almost from the outset. He traveled round the country and into Mexico, organizing trade unions and leaving his wife to raise their daughters. They lived at various addresses in Los Angeles and during World War II (in which John was too old to serve) they resided on busy Twenty-sixth Street in Santa Monica. At the same time, they began to build a five-bedroom Monterey hacienda on nearby Franklin Street—a house they had planned for years, according to Eunice’s later memoir. The home was completed in 1946, but by that time John Murray was virtually an absentee father, and Eunice had no money for the mortgage. This was a grave disappointment for her, and she sold the home to Ralph Greenson after inhabiting it only four months; to maintain a connection to the house, she befriended the buyers and even asked if she might work for the doctor.

Almost at once, he hired her, putting her in the homes of his most important clients as monitor, companion and nursemaid, a position for which she had no training or special capability; she did, however (as Greenson required), obediently report to him every detail of his clients’ private lives. “It was strictly a financial relationship,” said Eunice’s son-in-law Philip Laclair, who married her daughter Marilyn.

She did it for the money. Her husband [John Murray] left her badly, she had no formal training as a nurse—not even a high school education—but she was a kind woman and became a valuable asset to Greenson. She always followed his orders very closely.

In 1950, after more than a decade of long separations, the Murrays were at last divorced—a moment that perhaps made Eunice feel more than ever a failure, for in terminating a marriage she failed to live out one of Swedenborgianism’s essential tenets; she had also failed in her emulation of Carolyn. (John Murray subsequently remarried, moved to New Mexico, and died in 1958.) From 1950, Eunice was a lonely woman looking for purpose and comfort, and this she found in her work for Ralph Greenson. Eager to serve a man of authority who was both father figure and carer of souls, Eunice was sent by him to work (as she said) “in any kind of therapy that seemed indicated,” either with clients “seriously ill with depression or schizophrenia, [or with] others, like Marilyn Monroe, [who] were simply recovering from stressful experiences and needed supportive aid.”

With her famous client Marilyn Monroe, who also bore the name of her youngest daughter, it would have been natural for Eunice to sense a younger version of herself—a shy, confused soul abandoned by her parents, denied education and victimized by unhappy marriages. Here Eunice (by 1961 a grandmother) had an opportunity to revise her own earlier life, to correct what had gone wrong—with the help of the common denominator she shared with Marilyn: Ralph Greenson. From the first day of their meeting at Doheny Drive in 1961, she regarded Marilyn as a recalcitrant child—so Greenson also described her—and as Marilyn’s friends soon recognized, Eunice treated her with a certain benign condescension, indicating in her sweet, quiet manner where they should shop and how they should arrange their schedule around Marilyn’s daily sessions with Greenson. And Marilyn, accustomed to accepting her doctor’s decisions, offered no resistance—for the present. But very soon, as everyone recognized, Marilyn resented Eunice’s prying and her obvious function as the doctor’s “plant.”

Among the first to recognize that Eunice was inappropriate for Marilyn was Pat Newcomb, who had almost daily contact with her client, helping to schedule appointments for photographers and reporters as well as facilitating the ongoing discussions with Fox. “At first,” said Pat,

Marilyn sought her advice because she was supposed to be this wonderful housekeeper Greenson had found for her. But from day one, I did not trust Eunice Murray, who seemed to be always snooping around. I tried to stay out of her way because I just didn’t like her. She was sort of a spook, always hovering, always on the fringes of things.

Alan Snyder was also dismayed, frankly describing Eunice as “a very strange lady. She was put into Marilyn’s life by Greenson, and she was always whispering—whispering and listening. She was this constant presence, reporting everything back to Greenson, and Marilyn quickly realized this,” for Eunice could often be overheard telephoning to Greenson the details he desired.

As Christmas approached, Marilyn telephoned Ralph Roberts in New York, telling him she was having a miserable time in therapy but that she still felt her best option was to stay with Greenson. “She said that she dreaded doing the movie that was being planned for her, that she missed her Manhattan friends, and she asked me to return to Los Angeles with her after the trip she planned to New York early in 1962.” But despite her unhappiness Marilyn was, she told Ralph, looking forward to Christmas: Joe was coming to spend the holidays with her.

DiMaggio arrived in Los Angeles on December 23, decorated Marilyn’s apartment with a tree and stocked her refrigerator with champagne and caviar. On their behalf, Marilyn had accepted an invitation to the Greensons for Christmas dinner; Joe, always shy with strangers, reluctantly agreed to attend. New Year’s Eve, however, the former Mr. and Mrs. DiMaggio spent quietly together at Doheny Drive.

That season, Marilyn told Ralph and Pat (and presumably Joe) that Mrs. Murray was on the lookout for a house in Brentwood, a western section of Los Angeles near Santa Monica and Franklin Street. This was the location Greenson and Mrs. Murray thought best for Marilyn. Come to think of it, Marilyn added, it was odd: somehow she could never bring herself to address her housekeeper as anything but “Mrs. Murray,” who always addressed her familiarly as “Marilyn.”

1. By the time Marilyn’s Estate was finally appraised in 1963, it was valued at $92,781 (orabout $375,000 in 1993 dollars). Lee Strasberg’s second wife, whom he married after the death of Paula in 1966, was his sole beneficiary when he died in 1982; thus Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, a woman Marilyn never knew, became heir to the bulk of Marilyn Monroe’s Estate—which meant primarily income from film royalties and from the licensing of her image on coffee mugs, T-shirts, pens, etc. In 1992, this generated something in excess of one million dollars a year. By this time, Marianne Kris was long dead, and her heirs were the Anna Freud Children’s Clinic in London.

2. To confuse tourists and fans, Marilyn installed on the doorbell at Doheny Drive the name Marjorie Stengel. Formerly Montgomery Clift’s secretary, Stengel had worked briefly for Marilyn in New York after the departure of May Reis.

3. This was fortuitous for Brown and for film history: David Brown went on to produce or co-produce an impressive array of films: The Sting, Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, The Player and A Few Good Men, to name only a few.

4. The 1940 script, by Sam and Bella Spewack, was itself inspired by the Tennyson poem “Enoch Arden,” about a seaman believed dead who returns after a long absence to find his wife remarried. Recognizing her happiness, he does not reveal his identity and subsequently dies of grief. The Spewacks and their successors slyly named the couple of their movie scenario Ellen and Nick (combined to allude to Enoch) Arden.