Chapter Twenty
IN LATE JANUARY 1962, Eunice Murray found a home for Marilyn Monroe. Ralph Greenson accompanied his patient on her first visit to approve the choice, and she purchased it from the owners, William and Doris Pagen, for $77,500. Marilyn had prudently deferred her income from Some Like It Hot and The Misfits, and that January she received checks totaling $225,000; most of this paid past taxes, and then Marilyn put down $42,500 and signed for a 6¼ percent, fifteen-year mortgage, with monthly payments of $320. She would take title and possession of her new home two months later.
Contracts were drawn up without problems and with the assistance of her new attorney, Milton Rudin (Greenson’s brother-in-law). Rudin expedited the purchase of the house and subsequently managed the transfer of Marilyn’s representation from MCA to his own firm. With Greenson, Murray, Weinstein and Rudin in place, both the private and professional aspects of Marilyn Monroe’s life seemed safely assured. Only for a moment did she hesitate before signing the escrow papers: “I felt badly because I was buying a house all alone,” she said later. But encouraged by Greenson, buy it she did, although as Marilyn’s friend and stand-in Evelyn Moriarty recalled, “she was talked into this house—by Mrs. Murray and by Dr. Greenson, as she told us several times while we were filming Something’s Got to Give.”
The house was remarkably like a modest version of the Murray-Greenson home. Near Santa Monica and the ocean, between Sunset and San Vicente boulevards, there is a run of short, dead-end streets off Carmelina Avenue known as the “numbered Helenas.” At 12305 Fifth Helena Drive was a Spanish hacienda behind a high white wall. Secluded and private, the small (twenty-three-hundred-square-foot), single-story house with attached garage and a tiny guest house needed considerable refurbishing, but it had a red-tiled roof, thick white stucco walls, casement windows, a beamed cathedral ceiling in the living room and arched doorways throughout. The property also featured lush plantings and a swimming pool—all nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac convenient to shopping, to Fox and a mere mile from the Greenson residence on Franklin Street, just around the golf course of the Brentwood Country Club.
A visitor at the front door looked down to see a tile with the Latin motto CURSUM PERFICIO, a translation from the original Greek of a New Testament verse.1 The threshold gave, without foyer, onto a small living room; to the left were a kitchen, dining area and small solarium; to the right were three small bedrooms, one facing the front lawn, with a small private bath, and two smaller bedrooms connected by a second bath. As was the custom in many homes built during the Great Depression, there was little closet space—two small cupboards for three bedrooms, plus a linen closet—and none of these had operating locks, as Eunice pointed out. This was bad news to Marilyn’s new secretary, a woman in her late fifties named Cherie Redmond. From January 1962, Cherie worked at Doheny Drive; from March, she was at Fifth Helena; and when production on the new film began, she was in daily attendance at Fox.
Cherie wished to secure Marilyn’s financial papers, checks and related private materials in a closet or in one of the small bedrooms—“but there isn’t one door in the place that locks,” as she wrote to her New York counterpart, Hedda Rosten (who was taking care of mail and minor secretarial duties at Fifty-seventh Street). As the next owners after Marilyn discovered, none of the inoperative interior locks were repaired while she was in residence. (Cherie finally had one installed for her small file cabinet, on March 15.)2
Just as Marilyn was planning the partial renovation of the new house and the purchase of new, Mexican-style furnishings, she heard the first rumblings of Hollywood talk about an important new man in her life: nothing in the press, of course (that would have been unthinkable in 1962), simply party chatter. In time, the talk became a loud shout, then an avalanche.
A passionate love affair between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy has been assumed for so long that it has achieved as solid a place in public awareness as almost any other event in the man’s presidency.
But if the phrase “love affair” describes a protracted intimacy sustained by some degree of frequency, then such a connection between these two is impossible to establish with any of the rudimentary tools of historico-critical studies. In the absence of such evidence, no serious biographer can identify Monroe and Kennedy as partners in a love affair. All that can be known for certain is that on four occasions between October 1961 and August 1962, the president and the actress met, and that during one of those meetings they telephoned one of Marilyn’s friends from a bedroom; soon after, Marilyn confided this one sexual encounter to her closest confidants, making clear that it was the extent of their involvement.
In October 1961, after a photography session for a magazine story, Marilyn asked Allan Snyder to deliver her to a party at Patricia and Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. The occasion was a dinner party honoring Pat’s brother, President Kennedy, and among the other guests were several blond movie stars—Kim Novak, Janet Leigh and Angie Dickinson, for all of whom the president had a keen appreciation. All contrary allegations notwithstanding, this was the first meeting between Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy; hearsay about any earlier introduction simply cannot be substantiated. Before this, the schedules of Monroe and Kennedy since his January 1961 inauguration reveal wide geographic distances between them. That October night, Marilyn was driven back to her apartment by one of the Lawfords’ staff.
The second encounter occurred during February 1962, when Marilyn was again invited to a dinner party for the president, this time at the Manhattan home of Fifi Fell, the wealthy socialite widow of a famous industrialist. She was escorted from her New York apartment to the Fell residence by Milton Ebbins, who also saw her home.
The third meeting occurred on Saturday, March 24, 1962, when both the president and Marilyn were houseguests of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs. On that occasion, she telephoned Ralph Roberts from the bedroom she was sharing with Kennedy.
“She asked me about the solus muscle,” according to Ralph, “which she knew something about from the Mabel Ellsworth Todd book [The Thinking Body], and she had obviously been talking about this with the president, who was known to have all sorts of ailments, muscle and back trouble.” Ralph clearly recalled not only the origin and detail of Marilyn’s question but also the ease with which Kennedy himself then took the phone and thanked Roberts for his professional advice. “Later, once the rumor mill was grinding,” according to Ralph,
Marilyn told me that this night in March was the only time of her “affair” with JFK. Of course she was titillated beyond belief, because for a year he had been trying, through Lawford, to have an evening with her. A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that.
The fourth and final meeting took place in May 1962, at the legendary birthday gala for Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, an event that included a party afterward at the home of movie executive Arthur Krim and his wife Mathilde, a scientist later renowned for her great work against AIDS. This May meeting was the briefest of them all, as the president, his brother and his family were mobbed by friends, admirers and the press all evening.
Were Marilyn Monroe’s characteristic candor on such matters the only evidence—the fact that she never exaggerated nor minimized her romantic involvements—that would be weighty reason to accept her version of the one night of intimacy. There is, however, good external evidence to support her claim. Accounts of a more enduring affair with John Kennedy, stretching anywhere from a year to a decade, owe to fanciful supermarket journalists and tales told by those eager for quick cash or quicker notoriety: those who fail to check the facts of history and are thus easily dispatched as reliable sources.
In fact, there were at least two other famous blond actresses whose affairs with President Kennedy are far more easily established. One, Angie Dickinson, almost completed her autobiography—all details of her affair with the president intact—but then she decided to omit the Kennedy affair. But with that excision, her story apparently lacked drama. On third thought, she withdrew the typescript, returned the money paid as an advance against royalties and, having once entered the publishing kingdom, abandoned all hope forever. A second blond actress, whose autobiography was in fact published, simply omitted any mention of her brief affair with the president.
“Marilyn liked [President Kennedy] the man as well as the office,” according to Sidney Skolsky, among the first friends to be informed of the March tryst; he added that she also enjoyed the fantasy that this experience carried—“the little orphan waif indulging in free love with the leader of the free world.” And as she soon after told Earl Wilson, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts, she found John Kennedy amusing, pleasant, interesting and enjoyable company, not to say immensely flattering. As for Mrs. Kennedy, as Skolsky added, “Marilyn did not regard [her] with envy or animosity,” and was aware that her own role in Kennedy’s life (like that of other women she knew) was limited to a necessarily shallow transiency.
The posthumous revelations of Kennedy’s philandering revealed the impossibility, for obvious reasons, of pursuing any serious romance with one woman. The exaggeration of his “affair” with Marilyn is part of the myth of King Arthur’s Camelot, an image subsequently grafted onto his brief term. There was a need to believe in the tradition of courtly intrigues and infidelities—Lancelot and Guinevere, Charles II and Nell Gwynn, Edward VII and Lily Langtry; Nell and Lily were actresses in the bargain. John F. Kennedy was, he might have thought, exercising a benevolent droit du seigneur.
But in this case there was but one rendezvous between the attractive, princely president and the reigning movie queen; to follow the Arthurian simile: the mists of Avalon are easily dispersed by shining reality’s clear light onto the scene.
It is important to establish definitively the truth of this matter not only for the sake of historical accuracy but also because of a far more damaging rumor that began after Marilyn Monroe’s death. The unfounded and scurrilous accounts of a concomitant or subsequent sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother and attorney general, has been even more persistent than that of the presidential liaison. It has also led to the completely groundless assertion of a link between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn’s death—a connection so outrageous as to be hilarious were it not also injurious to the man’s reputation.3
The rumors of an affair with Robert Kennedy are based on the simple fact that he met Marilyn Monroe four times, as their schedules during 1961 and 1962 reveal, complementing the testimony of (among others close to Kennedy) Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s closest associate during this time. But Robert Kennedy never shared a bed with Marilyn Monroe.
Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and journalist, was Special Assistant for Public Information in the Kennedy administration as well as senior press officer for the Justice Department. The travel logs of the attorney general’s schedule for 1961–62 (preserved in the John F. Kennedy Library and in the National Archives) support the detailed accounts provided by Guthman. These, collectively, attest to the fact that Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe enjoyed a socially polite relationship—four meetings and several phone calls over a period of less than ten months. But their respective whereabouts during this time made anything else impossible—even had they both been inclined to a dalliance, which is itself far from the truth on both counts.
Marilyn’s first meeting with Robert Kennedy occurred several weeks before her introduction to the president. “On either October 2 or 3, 1961,” said Guthman,
Kennedy and I were attending a series of meetings with United States attorneys and members of the FBI in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The attorney general and I attended a dinner party at the Lawfords, and around midnight Marilyn decided to go home. But she had drunk too much champagne, and we were worried for her. Bobby and I would not let her drive her car, and we did so together, delivering her safely to her door.
The second meeting between the attorney general and Marilyn occurred on Wednesday evening, February 1, 1962, when he and his entourage dined at the Lawfords en route from Washington to the Far East on a month-long diplomatic journey. “That evening,” according to Guthman, “Marilyn was quite sober—a terrifically nice person, really—fun to talk with, warm and interested in serious issues.”
Pat Newcomb, also present at the dinner, remembered that Marilyn
really cared about learning. The day before [the dinner party], Marilyn told me, “I want to be in touch, Pat—I want to really know what’s going on in the country.” She was especially concerned about civil rights—she really cared about that. She had a list of questions prepared. When the press reported that Bobby was talking to her more than anyone else, that’s what they meant. I saw the questions and I knew what they were talking about. She identified with all the people who were denied civil rights.
The next day, February 2, Marilyn wrote two letters. To Isadore Miller, Marilyn sent a two-page letter in which she wrote to her “Dear Dad,”
Last night I attended a dinner in honor of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. He seems rather mature and brilliant for his thirty-six years, but what I liked best about him, besides his Civil Rights program, is he’s got such a wonderful sense of humor.
That same day, she wrote to Arthur Miller’s son Bobby:
I had dinner last night with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, and I asked him what his department was going to do about Civil Rights and some other issues. He is very intelligent and besides all that, he’s got a terrific sense of humor. I think you would like him. I was mostly impressed with how serious he is about Civil Rights. He answered all of my questions and then he said he would write me a letter and put it on paper. So, I’ll send you a copy of the letter when I get it because there will be some very interesting things in it because I really asked many questions that I said the youth of America want answers to and want things done about.
The third and fourth meetings were the most casual of all: at the president’s birthday gala in New York on May 19 (among hundreds of other guests); and when Peter and Patricia Lawford invited Marilyn to attend a dinner party for Robert Kennedy on Wednesday, June 27. The Lawfords came for Marilyn early that evening, and with them was the attorney general—at Marilyn’s specific invitation, for she had invited them all to see her new home. From there, they proceeded to the Lawfords’ house for dinner; later, the attorney general’s driver delivered her back to Fifth Helena. “They all came over to see the house,” according to Eunice. “She certainly didn’t go sneaking around with Mr. Kennedy or have a love affair with him!”4
All other accounts simply cannot be proven. Those who claim Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had a tryst in Los Angeles on November 18, 1961, for example, fail to deal with the fact that on that date, Kennedy was in New York, addressing a convocation at Fordham University; Marilyn, who was preparing for her photographic sessions with Douglas Kirkland, dined in Los Angeles with the Greensons after a psychiatric session at the doctor’s home. Such tale-spinners are equalled only by those who place the lovers’ meetings on February 24 and March 14, 1962: on the first date, Kennedy was in Bonn, Germany, and Marilyn was in Mexico; on the second, he was in Washington addressing the American Business Council while she had just moved into her new home and had in her company Joe DiMaggio. And so it goes.
As long as he knew Robert Kennedy, said Edwin Guthman, he never had the remotest impression of an affair with Marilyn—much less any other woman.
Ethel was the woman in his life, and he seemed uninterested in any other except in the normal, socially acceptable and public way of such things. That summer, Marilyn did indeed call [Kennedy] several times at his Washington office. Bobby was a good listener, and he took an interest in her questions, her life, even her troubles. But the truth is that for me, for Bobby, and for Angie [Novello, Kennedy’s secretary], the calls became something of a joke, and certainly nothing secret or whispered. We would say to one another something like, ‘Oh, here she is again, with questions about this or that.’ But these were always brief conversations. He was not a man to spend a lot of time on small talk with anyone. And to have an affair? Well, frankly it wasn’t in his character.
To a person, Hollywood and New York reporters who knew Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy are unanimous in agreement. “The man [with whom she had the brief affair] was not Bobby Kennedy, but his brother John,” wrote Earl Wilson. “There was no doubt it was Jack and not Bobby,” according to Marilyn’s old friend Henry Rosenfeld. And Richard Goodwin, assistant special counsel to President Kennedy, a director of the subsequent Robert Kennedy campaigns and a leading scholar on the Kennedy family, put the matter simply: “Anyone who knew Bobby Kennedy knew that it was not in his temperament [to have an affair]. We had many intimate talks over the years, and Marilyn Monroe’s name never came up. Given Bobby’s relation to his brother, it would have been unthinkable for him to ‘take over’ the relationship, as some have claimed.”5As for Marilyn, she asked Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts if they had heard rumors of a romance between her and Robert Kennedy; when they replied that indeed they had, she insisted they were false. (Furthermore, according to Ralph and Rupert, Marilyn did not find the younger Kennedy physically appealing.)6
Four days after the February 1 dinner at the Lawford house, Marilyn was in New York, en route to visit Isadore Miller, then living in Florida, and from there she was going on for a shopping trip in Mexico. Her devotion to Miller in his lonely widowhood, like her affection and generosity to Arthur’s children, continued uninterrupted until her death, even after Arthur’s marriage to Inge Morath early in 1962. After Marilyn moved into her new home that March she often sent Isadore, Bobby and Jane gifts, made frequent offers of airline tickets for them to visit her in California and asked what she might do for them as their friend.7
In New York, Marilyn was first happily reunited with the Strasbergs. They attended the Old Vic’s production of Macbeth at the City Center with her on February 6. Marilyn then spent three days discussing with Paula the first, incomplete draft of the script forSomething’s Got to Give, and she attended several open and private classes at the Actors Studio. At the same time, she received many messages from California each day—about her new home; about the starting date for the film (she had yet to meet Weinstein); about calls from Joe, who was surprised to locate her in New York when he had made a special journey to visit her in Los Angeles; from Greenson, who called at least once daily. All these messages were meticulously recorded, logged and preserved by Cherie Redmond.
In addition to the calls, there were meetings with representatives of Life magazine regarding a forthcoming interview, and a conversation with Alan Levy that formed the basis of a long article in Redbook later that year. Like Marilyn’s friends, Levy found her thoughtful and articulate.
Eunice, meanwhile, had obtained from Marilyn several hundred dollars’ advance on her weekly salary and departed Los Angeles on Monday, February 12. She visited her brother-in-law Churchill Murray in Mexico City, checked into a hotel and awaited Marilyn’s arrival for their shopping expedition. No matter that Pat Newcomb was entirely prepared to attend Marilyn as friend and companion on the trip: Greenson had arranged that Eunice was to be with them.
“It wasn’t hard to understand,” Pat said later. “Eunice was simply Greenson’s spy, sent down to report back everything Marilyn did. Soon even Marilyn began to see this.”
On Saturday the seventeenth, Marilyn arrived in Miami, where she was met by Pat Newcomb and by her new personal Los Angeles hairstylist, George Masters (who had the painstaking task of maintaining Marilyn’s platinum color). For three days, Marilyn entertained Isadore, taking him to dinner at the Hotel Fontainebleau’s Club Gigi and to a cabaret show at the Minaret. That spectacle was a disappointment, according to Miller, but when he suggested that they leave, Marilyn, who had been recognized, was unwilling to hurt the performers’ feelings by rising to depart. The next evening, she gave a dinner for several of Isadore’s friends, and after she departed on Tuesday, he found two hundred dollars in an overcoat pocket. He had spent more than that on her in times past, she replied when he telephoned later to protest. “You see,” he said later, “Marilyn wanted me to protect her [like a father], but she also protected me.”
Apart from her hospitalizations, Marilyn had not been much in the public eye for over a year, and so Pat Newcomb and George Masters joined her for the trip to Mexico City: two press conferences had been arranged at the Hilton, to reveal a slim, lovely Marilyn shopping for her new home and speaking enthusiastically (despite her misgivings about the project) of going to work the following month on Something’s Got to Give. Over eleven days beginning February 21, Marilyn met the press and then, in the company of Fred Vanderbilt Field and his wife Nieves (to whom she was just then introduced through mutual friends), Marilyn toured Cuernavaca, Toluca, Taxco and Acapulco. They rummaged local shops, bought native furniture and housewares and ordered Mexican tiles for Marilyn’s new kitchen and bathrooms. And as Pat and Eunice both noted, Marilyn took no sleeping pills, no drugs of any sort during this time.
While Pat expertly supervised press relations throughout the trip, George saw that Marilyn was—even on a casual outing—perfect to behold. “Whenever she was being made up and I was doing her hair that extraordinary platinum,” George recalled,
some incredible change occurred and she became “Marilyn Monroe.” Her voice changed, her hands and body motions altered and suddenly she was a different woman from the plain girl with faded blue jeans and a worn shirt I’d seen a few moments before. I’ve never seen anything like this complete change of personality. She was brilliant. She knew how to become what people expected.
He also found Eunice extraordinary, but (like Marilyn’s other friends) in a different way. “She was—how can I put it?—a very weird woman, like a witch. Terrifying, I remember thinking. She was terrifically jealous of Marilyn, separating her from her friends—just a divisive person.”
But such efforts on Eunice’s part were unavailing when it came to a new and brief acquaintance Marilyn made that month. A Mexican Monroe fan named José Bolaños located them, claiming to be a writer as well as an admirer. Slim and dark with movie-star good looks, he was Marilyn’s occasional escort for social events during the journey. Then, from Los Angeles, came the news of another Golden Globe Award for Marilyn, to be presented in March—whereupon she said to Pat, “I guess I can go to the dinner with Sidney Skolsky.” Instead, Pat suggested that it would be good publicity for her to invite Bolaños to fly back as her escort for that evening.
At their expense, he was thrilled to do so. On Friday, March 2, the little entourage returned to Los Angeles, and the following Monday she again received the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s award as “the world’s favorite female star.” George Masters, who helped prepare Marilyn for the evening, recalled that she ordered a green, floor-length beaded dress and then summoned two seamstresses from Fox; she stood for seven hours while the women recut the dress so that it would be dramatically backless instead of scooped-neck.
The presence of Marilyn with José at the dinner ignited rumors of a new Latin lover. Whatever the extent of the relationship (it does not seem to have been very romantic), José was back in Mexico soon after the award dinner, for another Joe had arrived, as if on cue. Unwilling to contest the presence of the legendary slugger, José retreated to his prior position as Marilyn’s ultimate Mexican fan, with what supplementary memories may never be known.
Joe’s unexpected arrival was not due to jealousy. He had heard (as who familiar with Hollywood news had not) that Marilyn’s deportment at the award dinner that Monday evening was uncharacteristically embarrassing: she was, as her friend Susan Strasberg observed, “drunk, barely in control, her voice slurred—and she wore a dress so tight she could hardly move.” For once, the silence in the room betokened not admiration or awe but, even in Hollywood, shock.
There were both chemical and emotional causes for her unusual conduct. She had received several injections on Saturday, Sunday and Monday from Hyman Engelberg—“vitamin shots,” as Eunice Murray euphemistically called them, but clearly more potent combinations of drugs. Among them were Nembutal, Seconal and phenobarbital (all dangerous and habituating barbiturates) and, for quick sleep, chloral hydrate (the so-called Mickey Finn knockout drops). These drugs, also provided for Marilyn in capsule form by prescription, were not so strictly controlled by the government then as they were later.
As the noted pathologist Dr. Arnold Abrams observed later, “It was irresponsible to provide this sort of thing in the amounts Marilyn Monroe received them, even in 1962. These were known to be toxic drugs requiring careful monitoring. This was not 1940, when there was far less knowledge about this kind of medication.” To make matters worse, Greenson, too, began to provide heavier doses of sleeping pills; only later did he and Engelberg try to coordinate their prescriptions, with completely ineffectual results.
For physicians held in such apparent high regard, they failed egregiously to note the difference between relaxation and relief from stress. When Marilyn Monroe awoke after an intake of barbiturates, she was just as anxious as before—over professional matters that were quickly exacerbated by drugs. Barbiturates, like Valium and Librium (then being widely introduced), clearly relaxed people, but there was an erroneous assumption that they also relieved stress. Quite the contrary: the patient simply awoke with the same anxieties, which often seemed worse because of the depressing effect of the drugs themselves. Pat Newcomb, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts knew that Marilyn’s medicine cabinet and bedside table resembled sample drawers at Schwab’s: she had a veritable pharmacopoeia at her disposal.8
“During and after The Misfits,” as Roberts remembered, “Greenson took no steps to get Marilyn off drugs: in fact he provided them.” And with an eventual tolerance of three hundred milligrams of Nembutal nightly, she was indeed in a precarious situation—and of this neither physician could have been unaware. As Pat Newcomb said, “It is hard to understand negligence such as that.” Maintaining a roster of rich, famous and needy clients may provide at least a partial explanation, if not an excuse. “I never liked Greenson,” said Allan Snyder years later, “and never thought he was good for Marilyn. He gave her anything she wanted, just fed her with anything. There seemed something strange and phony about his entire relationship with Marilyn. And when he got himself on the Fox payroll, I was certain of it.”
There was also an element of emotional turmoil that lay behind Marilyn’s heavy sedation that weekend. On Saturday, March 3, she saw Greenson for the first time in a month: cheerful when she arrived, she was tearful and depressed after the session. Indeed, she did not return to José Bolaños (who had checked in with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel that night), but instead remained with the Greensons. The content of her therapeutic session cannot be determined. Separately, it is known that Marilyn was greatly distressed by the news that Nunnally Johnson had completed his work on Something’s Got to Give and departed the project, which now seemed destined for disaster because no one could resolve (much less update) the script’s complicated emotional threads, nor could any satisfactory conclusion be found for the story. “I don’t know whether it will ever be made or not,” Johnson wrote to his old colleague Jean Negulesco. “They seem to be too scared at Fox.”
For several days, Arnold Shulman (the original scenarist) was recalled, but it seemed to him that
the studio simply wanted to forget about the picture, which they couldn’t do because they had a tableful of signed contracts to pay off. I adored Marilyn, and when I confronted Peter Levathes and a few other good men at Fox that this was my understanding of the whole rotten scheme, it was unmistakable that this was their plan.
Fox, as David Brown recalled, was nearly bankrupt at the time, and among the films and television series then shooting at the studio, Something’s Got to Give was the most expensive. In addition, the situation was disastrous whether the picture was completed or not. If completed and released as scripted, it would be one of the most pallid, unfunny, emotionally confused “comedies” ever to come from a major studio—as the eight hours of outtakes and almost sixty minutes of edited, completed footage reveal. The final disposition of things in June leaves the distinct impression of a film no one believed would ever be completed—except Marilyn, who was, according to David Brown,
an artist who knew exactly what she needed and what was good for her career—and she knew very well that if she were the cause of the picture’s collapse, it would have been the very worst thing for her career. She knew she would have to do the picture once she had signed for it. She was a thorough professional, whatever her personal problems. She hadn’t become Marilyn Monroe without serious ambition, after all, and it didn’t desert her in 1962.
Shulman summed up the matter as he saw it: the new team of studio executives in charge at a time of unimaginable financial chaos wanted to force Marilyn’s hand—to make her quit the project—enabling them to sue her for breach of contract. “No matter what anybody writes,” Shulman told Marilyn that weekend, “they’re going to ruin the deal.”
When Marilyn arrived at Greenson’s home that weekend, then, she had reason for anxiety: Marilyn—who could hardly be called paranoid about this matter—rightly believed that the new regime at Fox considered her a dispensable commodity.
But Greenson’s method for dealing with her put the emphasis on his own needs, not hers. His technique was again an infringement of a cardinal rule of patient care: he invited her into the security of his home, under the pretext that hers would not be ready for the move-in until late the following week. As an almost incidental issue, there was José Bolaños, of whom Greenson could not have approved (otherwise the man would not have been summarily dismissed). So there was Marilyn, the Greenson subordinate, again dependent on her therapist instead of on her own resources, attached to him instead of her own choices and her own friends.
Even attorney Milton Rudin, who was Greenson’s brother-in-law and who said he “loved and admired [Greenson] like a brother,” recognized that whatever Greenson’s conscious motives, “he involved Marilyn beyond [the point] he should have with the family. He was worried about her all the time—and then he involved me in the situation, too. Well, it was easy to feel sorry for Marilyn, and my brother-in-law was a compassionate man.”
By Tuesday, March 6, Marilyn was still at the Greenson house, and it was then that Joe arrived in Los Angeles, traced her to Franklin Street, and went to visit, hoping to help prepare for the move to Fifth Helena, by then firmly scheduled for Thursday and Friday. But when he arrived, a strange and disturbing thing happened, witnessed by a doctor under Greenson’s supervision for psychotherapeutic internship.
On arrival, the young doctor learned that Marilyn Monroe was upstairs, “in residence” as she had often been during the previous year, and now under sedation for emotional collapse. This arrangement, he then believed (and still did many years later), was
out of line for a prominent training analyst who was supposed to be teaching students both the proper frame in which to help people and the proper professional identity to keep in working with patients.
But things became even more odd:
Joe DiMaggio came to the house, and Marilyn Monroe was upstairs. Learning that Joe had come, she wanted to see him. But Greenson forbade them to meet. He asked Joe to remain downstairs to talk with him, and after a while Marilyn began to make a minor fuss upstairs—like a person confined in a hospital against her will who wanted to see her family or her visitors. Nevertheless, Greenson insisted on detaining Joe, and Marilyn was eventually close to a tantrum.
Then came the strangest moment of all:
Joe excused himself and insisted that he was going to go up to see Marilyn, and Greenson turned to me and said, “You see, this is a good example of the narcissistic character. See how demanding she is? She has to have things her way. She’s nothing but a child, poor thing.”
The student said nothing, but the event disturbed him for years and led to his total loss of respect for his mentor. No professional expertise is required to recognize the classic signs of projection, for it was obviously Ralph Greenson himself who had to exert control and whose narcissistic personality demanded that he have his way with her. It is also remarkable that Greenson would ignore every accepted protocol of professional ethics by discussing his patient with a third party, regardless of the close relationship.
Henry Weinstein recalled a similar breach of ethics by Greenson, when the psychiatrist said to him one day, “Henry, don’t you pay any attention to these fantasies of hers. She has a lot of them—one that is a typical fantasy of girls, for example, is that they want to go to bed with their fathers. That was her fantasy.” Whether this was indeed Marilyn’s expressed dream or fear is impossible to know: by this time, Greenson himself was so deeply overwhelmed by his projection and countertransference that he may well have seen himself as the father figure to whom she was sexually attracted. In any case, his conversation about Marilyn with Weinstein was unconscionable. Marilyn’s growing distrust of Greenson was indeed not paranoid. “I think,” Weinstein said years later with compassion for them both, “that Ralph was dependent on her.”
It is astonishing that Greenson conducted himself with a patient in this manner, and that not a single one of his colleagues stood up to correct him. The reason may have been not only his enormous influence in the professional community, but also because he circulated among them the spurious and unsubstantiated report that Marilyn Monroe was “schizophrenic,” and that he himself was being supervised in caring for her by a man well known in Los Angeles for treating schizophrenics: Milton Wexler, who was not a medical doctor but the holder of an academic degree in psychology.
“At that time,” continued Greenson’s colleague,
everyone was experimenting with ways to treat schizophrenics, and Wexler had his own method. Greenson used Wexler as his supervisor, and thus gave his unorthodox treatment of Monroe an apparent legitimacy. One of the techniques was to invite the patient into the home—not only to provide what may have been lacking earlier, but to have a constant connection so the patient would never have undue anxiety on weekends, or [suffer] any separation trauma.
Marilyn was, then, being further locked into her childhood instead of being freed from it. And Greenson, once upstaged by his sister Juliet, brought Marilyn into his home to domesticate her, to demythicize her, to control her and reduce her celebrity—all of it in the name of treating her emotional maladies and her insecurity. At home in his private clinic, with his professional supervisor providing a convenient endorsement of his tactics, Greenson became the prototype of the analyst who believed himself free of the conventional boundaries. With his own psyche so overwhelmingly intertwined with Marilyn’s, he was no longer able to see the harm of his own actions. Greenson’s attempt to keep Marilyn and Joe separate, then, reveals that he sensed a threat to his primacy—just as he had with her dear friend Ralph Roberts, who was “one Ralph too many.”
Marilyn was the fairest game of all for such manipulation: impressed by learned and paternal men who seemed to offer protection; thrice divorced and uncertain of her own worth, acceptability, talent and capacity for love; about to have her own home for the first time—she mutely accepted what Greenson made of himself for her: the all-providing savior figure every healthy and unneurotic therapist dreads to become. Everything that happened between Monroe and Greenson from that spring to her death suggests a perilous obsession. “She was a poor creature I tried to help,” he said later, “and I ended up hurting her.” These were perhaps the truest words he could have chosen to summarize their association.
As he had at Payne Whitney, however, Joe managed to extricate Marilyn from the situation. They returned to Doheny Drive, whence the movers, on March 8 and 9, transferred her few pieces of furniture to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive; deliveries from Mexico and New York were awaited in the coming weeks. Joe stayed the weekend with Marilyn, left at the house a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush, and proceeded on Tuesday the fourteenth for business with Monette.
Ralph Roberts, who had returned to Los Angeles, was as usual a great help to Marilyn as she settled in. Because she had not yet chosen custom-made draperies for her bedroom, her first request of him was to tack up the blackout drapery she had at Doheny Drive, a single heavy piece of black serge that extended several feet wider than the window. “When she went to bed, she could not bear a flicker of light from outside and always slept in a closed, warm, unlocked room.” Better than anyone, Ralph Roberts was in a position to know these habits: he treated Marilyn with a massage several times weekly, and by the time he departed, she had already retired for the night.
The script of Something’s Got to Give, meantime, limped along its dreary way. On March 11, writer Walter Bernstein was brought in to see what he could do with the seemingly endless, unamusing scenes and turgid dialogue. By this time, as he recalled, the story and script costs alone had topped $300,000—six times what the production had budgeted. But Fox had lost twenty-two million dollars the previous year and (thus Bernstein) “executives were not easily awed by figures.” Eager to please both the studio and star, Bernstein set to his task and went to Marilyn’s home for script conferences. “She was very charming and accommodating,” he recalled.
She showed me proudly around her new house, and she was really lovely to be with. Things she had to say about the script were right on target. “Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t do this,” she said, and “Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t make this kind of move, they’d come to her,” and so forth. Some of this was typical movie star ego, but she was very shrewd about what would play and what wouldn’t. Perhaps most of all, I remember her saying, “Remember, you’ve got Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got to use her.”
She was, Bernstein added, particularly pleased with the Swedish-accented English she had perfected with a voice coach, to be used for one of the picture’s few genuinely droll sequences.
Weinstein, too, recalled that at their first meeting Marilyn said, “Henry, I think you ought to use this scene instead of that one . . . and this plot development, because let’s face it, if this part of the story is a struggle for a man between me and another woman, there’s no contest!” It was at such time, Weinstein recalled, that “she was very sure of herself, and her points were so well taken that we went ahead with virtually an entire rewrite.”
Charming and alert she may have been, but on March 15 Marilyn was attacked by a virus, suffering chills and a high fever. Besides her duties as publicist, Pat Newcomb became a friend in need, shuttling back and forth with tea and sympathy as well as business papers and ignoring Eunice’s clear resentment of anyone trespassing on what she regarded as her turf. The housekeeper had plenty to occupy her, as she informed Greenson, who immediately ordered Marilyn to double Eunice’s salary to two hundred dollars weekly—“based on the fact that Marilyn’s business secretary [Cherie Redmond] was receiving $250,” as Eunice said. Likewise, Eunice engaged her son-in-law Norman Jeffries, his brother Keith and two friends for the work to be done in and around the house—without telling Marilyn of the personal relationship. Moreover, according to Cherie’s daily account logs for March and April, Eunice asked for Marilyn’s signature on blank checks for Norman and Keith—a privilege she was rightly denied.
In her remarkably self-serving memoir, Eunice Murray expressed her disdain for Cherie Redmond, a shrewd lady with a keen eye and an honest pen who came highly recommended by Milton Rudin. For her part, Cherie resented Eunice’s authoritarian attitude: “It’s not particularly inspiring,” as she wrote to Hedda Rosten, “and in some ways terribly time-consuming, to work through Mrs. Murray—and from Tinkers to Evers to Chance never facilitates things.” Her analogy to a baseball double-play was apt for a system that did not help at home or work. But with her quiet persistence, Eunice was not only reporting but now arranging, too.
In light of her background and life experience (not to say her presence as Greenson’s alter ego), Murray’s proprietary attitude is easy to understand. Chosen for its resemblance to the home she lost and which was (as she said) the “bond” among herself, Greenson and Marilyn, the house at Fifth Helena became a kind of totem for her. Having lost her own family and her husband, the doctor was Eunice’s surrogate husband: a paternalistic ministerial figure whose vocation it was to help others, and with whom she had associated herself for fifteen years, continuing her adulation of her sister and brother-in-law.
With complete charge over Marilyn granted by Greenson, Eunice had the opportunity to correct her past by recreating it: for her, Marilyn’s house was hers—thus her virtual appropriation of its design, care and refurbishing. Just as she was making 12305 Fifth Helena her home, so was Marilyn her daughter, and Greenson her husband returned. In Marilyn Monroe’s life, Eunice Murray seemed for a time to regain everything to which she had ever aspired and then lost: the situation enabled her to be at last the unrealized, successful sister and the nurse-caretaker Carolyn had become. One of the major problems in all this was that Eunice was living more and more ineluctably in a dangerous fantasy life. Perhaps without their full realization, then, Ralph Greenson and Eunice Murray were fulfilling one another’s needs: the doctor was creating, as his wife said, a fantasy foster home, a haven for all those he could save; and the nursemaid was taking Marilyn as her life’s mission.
The object of this dangerous tangle of emotions was, however, stronger than most people believed. Determined to accept an invitation to join President Kennedy and other guests for the last weekend of March at Bing Crosby’s home in Palm Springs, Marilyn threw off her illness. At the Crosby home, she radiated grace and wit for the guests and spent her one night in the president’s bed.9 It was at this time that Kennedy invited her to join the Madison Square gala to be held in May; she not only accepted the offer but said she would sing “Happy Birthday.”
This pleasant weekend may at least partly explain why, the following Monday, Marilyn was (thus Walter Bernstein) “in good humor and full of energy” at a meeting with her producer, director and writer. While she was there, the studio doctor Lee Seigel arrived, took Marilyn into an inner office and administered one of his famous “vitamin shots,” those venerable Hollywood drug concoctions that kept employees energetic or sedated, depending on the company’s need and/or the star’s wishes. “Seigel was the Dr. Feelgood of Fox,” recalled the writer Ernest Lehman, who wrote and produced some of Hollywood’s finest screenplays. “I remember him giving me an intravenous injection once, as he did to hundreds of people at Fox. It was a dangerous mixture of amphetamines and God only knows what else.” The same sort of treatments were also being supplied to Marilyn every few days by Engelberg.
At the meeting, Marilyn learned that the start of Something’s Got to Give was now postponed to the end of April, and with that—despite an executive order from the studio that she not risk a relapse of her illness by traveling to New York—Marilyn departed to discuss the film’s problems with the Strasbergs. She was especially anxious, she told them, because an ending to the script still seemed beyond anyone’s imagination, and in such a quandary Paula’s assistance would be more than ever necessary as she groped her way through each day’s scenes. This arrangement Lee negotiated at a fee of five thousand per week, half to be paid by Marilyn herself. Once an ardent Socialist, Lee now knew the value of a dollar.
As usual, Marilyn was as prodigal as she was needy of Paula. That season she wrote a check for a thousand dollars, becoming one of the founding members of something called the Hollywood Museum Associates, a group planning a movie and television archive that never materialized; her check was never returned. The Miller children continued to receive occasional gifts for no other reason than her affection for them; and Marilyn sent to one of her studio hairdressers, Agnes Flanagan, a duplicate of a garden swing Agnes admired one day at Fifth Helena. Such acts of spontaneous generosity were still typical, as Allan Snyder recalled “You had to be very careful shopping with Marilyn. If you went to a store with her and pointed out a shirt or something you admired, you could be sure it would arrive at your home next day!”
This attitude was perhaps all the more remarkable because Marilyn, one of the handful of unfailingly bankable stars whose films, by this time, had earned Fox more than sixty million dollars, was honoring a commitment she could easily have simply torn up—to make Something’s Got to Give for $100,000. By comparison, Cyd Charisse (in a supporting role) was hired for $50,000; Tom Tryon (in an even less important role) was to be paid $55,000; and Dean Martin and George Cukor were receiving $300,000 each for a film budgeted at $3,254,000. “The arithmetic,” as another Fox producer said at the time, “makes Marilyn look like a doll. She could have got a million and a percentage of the gross any day of the week. The studio has got itself a tremendous bargain.” If this is so, it remains unclear why her representatives did not negotiate for a higher salary: as David Brown noted, “an agent should have come in to write a new contract—it would have been that simple.”
But nothing in the executive offices at Pico Boulevard was ever simple, especially in 1962. The budget on the Burton-Taylor extravaganza Cleopatra, which shut down in London and was reshooting everything in Rome, sped toward thirty million dollars, and the studio back lot was sold to pay for it; in addition, the commissary and the talent school were shut down, and the lawns on the property went unwatered. In June 1961, Fox had twenty-nine producers, forty-one writers and 2,154 employees on its weekly payroll, working on thirty-one films; there were now fifteen producers, nine writers and 606 staff for only nine films. The fifty-five contract players in 1961 cost Fox a weekly total of $26,995; a year later, there were twelve actors under contract at a total of $7,480. Peter Levathes, his eye on the bottom line, announced proudly to Spyros Skouras that Something’s Got to Give would be produced on time and within its budget, requiring only forty-seven working days. This was a well-meant but almost comical proclamation, for when shooting finally began on April 23 the script was still incomplete, Marilyn was ill and Dean Martin had not yet completed a prior commitment.
Marilyn engaged a limousine and driver from the Carey Cadillac Company that spring, and records provide a chart to the course of her life. According to the detailed invoices charged to her and signed by her daily driver, Rudy Kautzky, her schedule up to the first day of shooting was unvarying, Mondays through Saturdays, from April 2. She began with a facial at Madame Renna’s on Sunset Boulevard, usually around noon; this was followed by a session with Greenson in his Beverly Hills office and a reading of script lines with Paula, who was in residence at the Bel-Air Sands Hotel on Sunset. Marilyn then visited either Engelberg, Seigel or specialists who treated other ailments that plagued her; these doctors administered injections, sometimes wrote concurrent prescriptions and routinely gave Marilyn what she requested. She was then driven for food shopping at the Brentwood Mart on San Vicente Boulevard or at Jurgensen’s in Beverly Hills, and in late afternoon she was driven back for a second session with Greenson at his home: by now he was sometimes bringing her in for twice-daily counseling.
The routine was broken only for costume and makeup tests at Fox on April 10 and wardrobe fittings at home on April 16. “She was so happy to be back at work,” according to Henry Weinstein. “The tests were marvelous. I never saw anyone so pleased and delighted as Marilyn during those tests. According to film editor David Bretherton, Allan Snyder (still her preferred makeup artist and close friend) and Marjorie Plecher (costumer for the film and subsequently Mrs. Snyder), Marilyn was more beautiful than ever when she arrived for the tests: they all noticed a clarity of expression, a luminous radiance and eagerness to work hard.
Weinstein’s recollection that all during mid-April she lay at home in a “barbiturate coma” and his panicky rush to the studio on April 11 to urge that the picture be canceled can only be due to his unfamiliarity with a Nembutal hangover. In fact, as the limousine records indicate, she left with her driver at nine-fifteen that morning for a usual day of appointments: Weinstein, youthfully eager but injudicious, had arrived at six.
Thenceforth, except for the final outcome of a hopelessly derailed and canceled picture, the making of Something’s Got to Give paralleled the production of any other Monroe picture. Terrified of appearing before the camera, as Weinstein and the entire company recalled, Marilyn delayed, malingered and overrehearsed; frightened of not sleeping sufficiently, she frequently took too many pills—no one bothered to monitor her intake—and so she was groggy and confused for several early morning hours; but determined to acquit herself well, she was brilliant when she finally arrived. Word-perfect, willing to work and rework a scene to the director’s pleasure, generous with her co-stars and fiercely dedicated to pleasing her audience, she was, as David Brown said, the consummate professional. As everyone became convinced—Snyder, Newcomb, Strasberg, Roberts, even Levathes—the source of the trouble was the conjunction of Greenson and Murray, a team they were powerless to counter. To her further alarm, Pat Newcomb discovered in mid-April that Eunice had moved into the guest room of Marilyn’s home.
“Marilyn couldn’t walk across a room without advice and counsel and people with vested interest,” Levathes said years later.
Her so-called advisors created the difficulties and caused her a terrible identity crisis. I thought Marilyn was a nice woman—not a shallow person who made no distinctions, but someone who thought about her life, who knew the differences between sham and reality. She had depth; it wasn’t all fluff. She was enormously complex during her suffering and her absences from the production, but at her best there was no one like her.
Cukor agreed: the advice she was getting was utter rubbish.
On Sunday, April 22, after a session with Greenson, Marilyn rode down to Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles. There the veteran hair colorist Pearl Porterfield (who had cared for, among others, the wavy white coiffure of Mae West) prepared Marilyn for her first day on the set of Something’s Got to Give. Eunice was so impressed with the look when Marilyn arrived home that henceforth she had her thin brown hair washed and styled by Pearl Porterfield, too.
Marilyn’s first scene was scheduled for Monday morning, April 23, but when she awoke she had a blinding headache, no voice, and impaired respiration: she was seen by her dentist (the only physician she could reach at five in the morning), who diagnosed acute sinusitis. For the rest of that week, she was ordered to rest at home, visits to Greenson being the sole exception. But such occurrences are hardly rare in movie-making, and there were contingency plans. Her point-of-view shots (what her character sees) were photographed that day, and, from Tuesday through Friday, scenes with Cyd Charisse and Dean Martin were filmed.
Finally, on Monday, April 30, Marilyn appeared on the set promptly at nine for her first scenes in the picture. With her hair brilliantly white, her skin unblemished, her eyes clear and alert, she wore the required costume for her entrance: a red and white floral-print sheath, a white coat and white shoes. For seven hours—and over forty times, according to a careful count of the outtakes—she repeated the closeups in which, as Ellen Arden, she returns to her home for the first time in five years. Standing at poolside, she gazes in silent wonder at her little boy and girl, splashing playfully, at first oblivious of her presence and then, when they chat with her, of her identity. The scene is a miracle, and not only because Marilyn in fact still had a severe sinus infection and a fever of one hundred and one degrees: she was forcing herself to work.
Finding her way through all the emotional complications of the character’s scene, she is alternately happy to see her children, frightened of their reaction, concerned for their welfare, proud of their growth and charm. In fully thirty of the forty takes Cukor directed, there is preserved forever Marilyn Monroe at the peak not only of her beauty but of the depth of her inner resources. With the daily help of Paula Strasberg, Marilyn had reached into her own lost childhood, and perhaps into the sorrow of her own failed pregnancies, and there she had found the mysterious complex of feelings that enabled her to give a simple scene its wistful, fully human regret. As in nothing she had done since Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, there is in this incomplete film the relic of an astonishing performance. Her smile is unforced, her brows arch and her eyes just begin to glaze with tears, as if a wash of memories has evoked both penance and longing.
The Marilyn Monroe of this film is wholly unlike that of All About Eve or Niagara, of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Seven Year Itch. She is mature, serene, fragile—but graceful and resplendent, too. None of the emotions were manufactured: they were, to the contrary, deeply felt, imagined, lived in some way. The laughter with the children moments later is neither cute nor manic, but joyous, wise, confident that somehow all will be well. No one who sees them (or the few moments preserved in the 1990 commercial documentary that bears the film’s title) can for a moment see this as anything but the efforts of a responsible and sensitive actress evoking recognizable human feeling and continuing to grow as an artist, just as she wished.
Marilyn worked until four o’clock that afternoon, when she returned home and collapsed into bed. Next day, Engelberg pronounced her ill with a sinus infection and unable to work—a judgment confirmed when Fox sent Seigel, who rang the executive offices to say he would not ask even the film’s cocker spaniel to perform in such a condition. Marilyn was ordered to bed for the remainder of the week, and the studio was so informed. There was an ancillary issue at stake, too: with the hugging scenes Marilyn was required to do with them, her closeness was considered risky for the health of the two children.
“She was genuinely ill,” according to Marjorie Plecher, “as anyone could see. But the studio didn’t want to believe her.” Allan Snyder agreed: Marilyn, never strong physically, had been susceptible to colds and respiratory infections over the fifteen years he had known her, and that week she spiked a high fever with her sinus infection: “But no one wanted to hear about that.” Pat Newcomb also knew this to be true.
On each day of the production call sheets from May 1 through 4, Marilyn’s absence was announced as if it were a last-minute development each morning. Evelyn Moriarty said she was always informed a day or two in advance of Marilyn’s continuing leave: “Marilyn did not simply not show up!” Alternate shooting could be hastily scheduled in her absence.
Despite illness, Marilyn worked with Paula for hours at home. But then Fox pulled another tactical error, sending a messenger at ten or eleven each night with revised script pages printed, according to tradition, on a different color paper from the previous or original pages of dialogue; these new lines had been composed by this writer or that one, by Cukor, by anyone willing to risk what now seemed impossible. With all this confusion, “Marilyn was shattered,” according to Nunnally Johnson, who kept in touch with her and the production. She saw her comeback film as a terrible failure, and she was right. “And then more and more [revisions] arrived, until in the end there were only four pages left from the original script.” When Cukor and Weinstein learned the distress this was causing Marilyn, they tried to mislead her by having the changes inserted into a freshly bound script with all pages on the same color paper as the original. “She was much too smart [not to say experienced] to be misled by that trick,” concluded Johnson.
That same week, when she complained to Weinstein and Levathes, Marilyn reminded them that she had permission to attend President Kennedy’s birthday gala in New York later in May. Evelyn Moriarty recalled that this absence was posted weeks in advance: indeed, the call sheet circulated on May 10 for May 17 noted that production would shut down that morning at eleven-thirty “because of Miss Monroe’s permission to go to N.Y.” It would have been unimaginable for the studio to deny the presence of Hollywood’s most famous star at a command performance. In addition, performers with other commitments were readily released for this special event, each sent to provide a portion of the evening’s entertainment. Marilyn’s upcoming appearance was already known and promulgated in New York, as Hedda mentioned to Cherie in a letter posted the first week of May.
For the occasion, Marilyn was submitting to hours of fittings with Jean Louis, who had created the notorious gown worn by Marlene Dietrich in 1953 for her nightclub premiere—a skintight array of sequins, brilliants, rhinestones and chiffon that covered and flattered while giving the illusion of nudity. In Dietrich’s case, a foundation garment was also required; Marilyn, however, would wear merely a sheer body stocking embroidered with sequins, so that she would seem to glitter in the spotlight. Literally sewn into it the evening of the party, she would wear, as Life magazine stressed later, “nothing, absolutely nothing, underneath,” and would appear enveloped only by reflected, diffused light—a veritable star indeed. Eunice made plain her disapproval of such a daring outfit: “It might have been more graceful if it were looser,” she said—to which Marilyn gaily replied, “Be brave, Mrs. Murray—be brave!”
Although both Marilyn’s and the studio’s physicians ordered her to remain home from Tuesday through Friday (May 1 through 4), Cherie—now working on Marilyn’s behalf at Fox—was required to telephone Eunice daily to ascertain the patient’s health. Her log for May 1 contains a curious annotation: “At 4:00, I called [Eunice], who said she would ask Marilyn how she felt and bring me back a message. But she didn’t come back on the line. I didn’t call her back and left at 6:30.” There are several such omissions on Eunice’s part during April and May: she seems to have been afflicted with either a gradually failing memory or an astonishing lack of courtesy. In any case, Eunice seemed to be taking on the characteristics of one or another of Marilyn’s doctors.
All that first week of May, Cukor shot around her, filming scenes with Dean Martin and Phil Silvers, Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse, a courtroom sequence on another sound stage, and Marilyn’s point-of-view shots. Again, Greenson insisted on seeing Marilyn twice daily, and on these outings her limousine logs include daily stops to the Vicente Pharmacy, the Horton & Converse drugstore or one or another Westwood chemist. Her analyst was still providing abundant medications—not for her sinus condition (that would have been the responsibility of Engelberg or Rubin, whom she also visited), but for her anxiety and depression over Something’s Got to Give. But the barbiturates and tranquilizers prescribed had exactly the opposite effect Greenson supposedly sought. Instead of encouraging Marilyn to work, the pills made her more and more dysfunctional: taken with the antibiotics, they became even more powerful sedatives and hypnotics, gradually rendering her confused, foggy and somnolent. Her condition could have been mistaken, by any passerby, as that of a confirmed alcoholic. To young Joan Greenson fell again the task of transporting Marilyn, often in a drug haze and with speech impaired, to and from her home when Rudy was off duty.
In such a condition, Marilyn’s behavior toward friends would occasionally be demanding or socially inappropriate. She sometimes treated Pat like a personal servant rather than a professional assistant, ordering a second telephone line installed at Pat’s home in order to have constant access to her publicist, for any request or complaint, any hour day or night. Yet when Pat’s car went down with a terminal complaint, Marilyn presented her with a new one, waving away the cost.
At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, May 7, Marilyn dutifully arrived for work, but a half-hour later, alternately perspiring and shaking with chills, she was sent home. Fearing this, Cukor and his unit manager had arranged an alternate schedule, and the company proceeded south to Balboa Island for other scenes. But by the time they arrived, the weather had turned inclement and remained so the next day. Everyone was back on the set Thursday, when Something’s Got to Give completed fourteen days of shooting (only one with Marilyn) and was four and a half days behind schedule—by no means a morbid situation, and one typical of many productions. With the usual Hollywood ingenuities (to cover, for example, accidents, illness, weather, revised scripts or new sets), plans could be rearranged: in fact the May 10 call sheet proposes only one additional day of shooting to compensate for losses thus far incurred.
On Friday, May 11, Marilyn rang the studio and asked Evelyn to bring some items from her dressing room, a task her stand-in was glad to do. Arriving at Fifth Helena and hoping for the chance to visit Marilyn, Evelyn was summarily and curtly dismissed by Eunice: “I’m sorry, Miss Monroe is in conference.” As Evelyn later learned, Marilyn was simply at the other end of the house, or in the bath, and unaware of her friend’s arrival. “But what could I do?” Evelyn asked rhetorically years later. “Mrs. Murray was like a class monitor for Dr. Greenson”—or, one might add, like Mrs. Danvers, the nightmarish housekeeper who terrorized the second Mrs. de Winter after the death of Rebecca.
Saturday, Paula arrived at the house with her sister Bea Glass, who had prepared homemade soups and delicacies Marilyn liked. Joe had come to stay for the weekend, and so there was briefly a circle of affectionate serenity around Marilyn, who was cheerful despite her lingering illness. Pat summarized the feelings of several confidants when she said that of all Marilyn’s entourage, “Paula was among the most loyal and helpful. She took the rap for Marilyn’s lateness, but she gave Marilyn a great deal. And she never tried to own Marilyn, or to cut others out of Marilyn’s life.” Ralph Roberts, who also stopped to visit, saw a warm and supportive atmosphere around Marilyn: “Joe was really the only one in her life then, and that gave us hope, for the rest of us knew there was something terribly wrong in Marilyn’s relationship with Greenson—even Rudy was aware of it.”
Still, Greenson had established a profound dependency—and then he betrayed it. On May 10, he and his wife departed for a five-week trip abroad: he was to deliver a lecture in Israel and they were to proceed to Switzerland for a long overdue visit with her mother, who had suffered a stroke in February. Weinstein implored Greenson not to depart: “Ralph had made himself very central to her functioning,” Weinstein recalled, “and frankly, I was surprised and annoyed. He left when all of this was going on.” But the trip was one Greenson’s wife much anticipated, perhaps as much for the chance to put some distance between her husband and the patient to whom he was inordinately and inextricably attached: by this time, anyone who knew patient and therapist also knew that she had become virtually his career. Greenson himself admitted to a close friend that “Hildi was afraid to leave me home alone.”
Greenson must have been fearful of leaving his patient, too—fearful for himself, his relationship with her, his control of her. What he did prior to his departure, however, was markedly injudicious.
When I left for a five-week summer vacation, I felt it was indicated to leave her some medication which she might take when she felt depressed and agitated, i.e., rejected and tempted to act out. I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in combination with a sedative—Dexamyl. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on. I can condense the situation by saying that, at the time of my vacation, I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her.
With this, the countertransference to which he referred—his dependence on Marilyn’s dependence on him—is as clear as the monumentally egocentric eroticism which had by this time taken control of him: Ralph Greenson was by now in the grip of an obsession over which, henceforth, he had no control. Hildi was quite right to be “afraid to leave [him] alone.” As for Dexamyl, it was an acceleration of the drug routine—a combination of Dexedrine and amobarbital—an amphetamine combined with a short-acting barbiturate that was eventually removed from the drug market because of the difficulty of achieving the correctly balanced ratio between the two chemicals.
Before his departure, Greenson recommended that Paula be dismissed from the production of Something’s Got to Give: still projecting his own feelings onto others, he told Marilyn that Paula was simply taking advantage of her and her money. Marilyn said nothing, and in fact, although Paula soon departed for a brief trip to New York, Marilyn conveyed no such notice of dismissal to her or the studio.
But she was annoyed with Eunice, and within days of Greenson’s departure she handed her a check and dismissed her. “By this time,” according to Pat, “Marilyn was on to Mrs. Murray. She resented her and wanted to get her out. Naturally those of us who were close to Marilyn were delighted.” With this single action alone, as Marilyn told her friends, she was making an important step in self-assertion, in establishing her independence from a woman whose meddling interference she resented and whose snooping was offensive. Acting the adult and taking responsibility for her action—this was, she always thought, the goal of her psychotherapy in any case.
The deed must have encouraged and invigorated her, for that day Marilyn sped off to Fox and, for ten hours, submitted with remarkable patience and good humor to over fifty takes of a scene involving the family cocker spaniel. Expert in rehearsals, the dog (named Tippy by Marilyn, after the one she had lost in childhood to a neighbor’s rage) refused to follow off-camera commands and cues, leaping around and behind her, panting and drooling over Marilyn for hours. Anyone else might have balked at kneeling so long on the ground waiting for an animal, but Marilyn laughed and joked that she knew how The Method could delay players until they find the right mood, and there was no reason a dog should not be similarly indulged. The hours of outtakes from this scene, often frustrating and uncomfortable for her, remain vastly amusing decades later. “He’s getting good!” she calls to Cukor after something like her twentieth take with the dog, and several times the film clips show Marilyn collapsing with laughter over the recalcitrant animal’s antics.
Her energy and good humor continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 15 and 16. But with writers scribbling furiously, Weinstein attempting to wrest from Cukor a sense of how this picture could continue without a firm finale and several key roles still uncast, the only scenes to be filmed were retakes of Marilyn with the children at pool-side.
The following morning, she was again on time for work, chatting excitedly about her departure for New York. At the same time, Fox’s telephone lines were jammed with a succession of calls to and from New York, aimed at preventing her journey. First, Weinstein learned from Cukor that if she were absent for Thursday afternoon and Friday’s shootings, the picture would be six days behind schedule, and the director would now have to account for the delays to the new executives. By this time, as Weinstein recalled, they had all forgotten an additional reason Marilyn would not be at work on the seventeenth: she had a letter of agreement appended to her contracts since 1956, to the effect that she would not be required at the studio during her menstrual period. “She had set that day aside before we began production,” Weinstein recalled years later, “and we had agreed we weren’t going to shoot that day.” This turned out to be a convenience for the film—but how could the producer and director say that her absence actually gave them time to work out the final script problems and complete the casting on this chaotic picture?
This was a matter of concern to Cukor and Weinstein only because of the fierce attention such matters were receiving from the financiers in New York and from Levathes, their legate at the studio. “I had no idea whether it was a good picture or not,” Milton Gould said years later. “I was not a moviemaker. My job was to solve money problems.” His was an honorable task bravely assumed: but not to care “whether it was a good picture or not” was also to act with pronounced myopia. Such an attitude in fact signaled the start of a trend that has long endured: creative decisions subsequently made by attorneys and business graduates, perhaps intelligent and benevolent, but ignorant of the fundamentally crazy and unpredictable nature of movie-making and the impossibility of maintaining religious dedication to production schedules. These new men were concerned only for the so-called bottom line, with no reference to the value of the entertainment product.
The result of this short-sightedness was predictable. Anxious, Weinstein (“whose termination I had already planned,” said Gould) called Milton Ebbins, Lawford’s man in charge of West Coast preparations for the gala: “You’ve got to do something, Milt. You’re Peter’s friend. You’ve got to help me. Marilyn is set to go to New York, and this just can’t happen.”
“What do you mean, it can’t happen?” countered Ebbins.
“Milt, she can’t go. We’re in the middle of a picture. Can’t you do something?”
“Listen, Henry. Number one, I don’t represent Marilyn Monroe. And number two, what’s this sudden problem? This has been planned for weeks. It’s the president’s birthday, for God’s sake!”
“Well, there’s going to be a lot of trouble, Milt. If she goes—I don’t know—she may lose the picture.”
“ ‘Lose the picture’? What does that mean?”
“You know—”
There was a moment of silence, as Ebbins recalled, and then he replied: “Look, Henry, I can’t believe she’s going to lose anything. Marilyn’s not that dumb. And Mickey [Milton Rudin] is not that dumb. Mickey never called me, never said a word!”
As Evelyn Moriarty recalled, there had been no effort to prevent Marilyn’s trip to New York until that week—and now every weapon in the corporate arsenal appeared. “When Peter [Levathes] called to tell me Marilyn was leaving for New York on Thursday,” according to Milton Gould, “I told him to forbid it. He did, but she went anyway. That’s when I told him to fire her.” This final drastic measure took several weeks, however much Gould may have hoped the matter would be adjudicated with all dispatch; at last, however, his bidding would be executed. The reasoning was simple: the studio could save over three million dollars by scrapping a film with only a half-dozen sets and twenty actors—a project doomed from the first day of script conferences and a project in which the director and the star had no confidence. If they could find a persuasive reason—a star’s illness, for example—Fox’s insurance company might be persuaded to reimburse the monies spent. At least the picture might be temporarily shelved, rewritten, perhaps recast and recommenced later.
Had Fox not rushed to production (as Milton Rudin, for one, wisely counseled against), Something’s Got to Give would either have been turned into a good film (first on paper, where all good films are made, and at which stage David Brown urged care and caution); or it would never have got beyond a prose treatment, saving money, jobs and the health of many. Of these machinations Marilyn knew nothing as she sped to New York.
“The whole thing was ridiculous,” Henry Weinstein said years later, reassessing the way the event was mismanaged.
At Fox, the men up front were trying to prove they were bosses. Had I been more experienced, I would have gone with her to New York with some press people from Fox. We could have made an advertising event out of it, going around with our own camera crew and signs reading Something’s Got to Give—Marilyn Monroe!—instead of worrying about the schedule. But these men were concerned only about power, which of course is a Hollywood fixation. And to be concerned about power when you have Marilyn Monroe is stupidity.
At half past eleven on the morning of May 17, as previously agreed, Marilyn’s scenes were concluded—just as Peter Lawford and Milton Ebbins, who were to escort Marilyn and Pat to New York, arrived at Fox by helicopter to whisk them away to Los Angeles International Airport. “Of course a car would have done just as well,” as Ebbins later said, “but Peter loved to fly around in that helicopter. I told him I was surprised he didn’t use it to go shopping at Sears.”
An hour later, Fox’s attorneys filed a breach-of-contract notice (dated the previous day, May 16), mailed to both MCA and to Milton Rudin, charging Marilyn with failure to work and a stern warning of dire consequences to follow. Had the studio’s legal department collected every saber from the prop rooms, the sound of rattling could not have been louder; to follow, one might have expected the muted clanking of chains.
Marilyn arrived that evening at her New York apartment, where early next morning Fox’s New York office delivered a copy of the breach-of-contract letter to her door: now she knew clearly that she was in danger of being fired. Her reaction (as Pat Newcomb and Ralph Roberts recalled) was undisguised, justifiable outrage: how could Greenson have blithely left her for Europe? Surely his connection to the production, to Weinstein and to Rudin put him in a unique position to know this action would be taken against her. How could her “team,” as the men at Fox called Weinstein, Greenson and Rudin, not protect her at such a time? Why, indeed, ought she to be receiving this letter at all? Why did she have advocates if they could not be trusted to defend her against such ridiculous charges? Only her friends and her insistence on acquitting herself in the present task enabled her to prepare with a residual equanimity.
On Friday evening, the composer and producer Richard Adler, who was staging the birthday salute for the president, came to Marilyn’s apartment to rehearse with her at the white piano. Over and over, for perhaps three hours, she sang “Happy Birthday to you . . .” Adler, recalled Ralph Roberts, “became more and more perturbed, because he was afraid she was going to sound too sexy. He even called Peter Lawford to ask Marilyn to tone down her manner. But of course she just smiled and went right on preparing it the way she thought it would be best.”
Madison Square Garden, on Saturday evening, May 19, was packed with more than fifteen thousand people who paid from one hundred to one thousand dollars for a ticket to a vast birthday party that served to pay off the Democratic National Committee’s deficit from the 1960 presidential campaign.10 Jack Benny, the elegant and witty master of ceremonies, introduced the performers—among them Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, Peggy Lee, Henry Fonda, Maria Callas, Harry Belafonte, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—but there had to be a musical interlude when Marilyn’s turn came, for she was as usual late. At last she arrived at the Garden, and was ready to go onstage after a last minute touch-up by Mickey Song, who styled the Kennedy brothers’ hair. “We kept working around her lateness,” remembered William Asher, the producer of the event, “and the comedian Bill Dana suggested that Peter introduce her as ‘the late Marilyn Monroe.’ ” Which is exactly what Peter did. In one of the most awkward and jarring moments in the history of events recorded by television, Marilyn—barely able to walk in her skintight body stocking—inched her way to the podium and Lawford announced, “Mr. President: the late Marilyn Monroe.”
Removing an ermine jacket and revealing herself in what Adlai Stevenson called “skin and beads,” a nervous Marilyn tentatively began to sing “Happy Birthday.” It was not, as Adler had feared, tawdry or inappropriate, but breathless, with just a hint of parody—as if she would wink at a hoary cliché. Did not a handsome young president deserve a new rendition, something different from what might be heard at the party of a seven-year-old? When the audience cheered and applauded after her smoky, nightclub rendition of the first verse, she jumped with delight, waving her arms and shouting, “Everybody—sing!” A second chorus accompanied the arrival of a six-foot cake with forty-five candles, borne aloft by two chefs. Marilyn concluded her stint with a few lines sung to the tune of “Thanks for the Memories:”
Thanks, Mr. President,
for everything you’ve done,
The battles that you’ve won—
The way you deal with U.S. Steel . . .
Halfway into his twenty-minute address, Kennedy thanked the performers individually, commenting that “Miss Monroe left a picture to come all the way East, and I can now retire after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” It was but one of many laugh lines in a typical Kennedy speech that combined political rhetoric, wit, good cheer and earnest allusions to important social issues. Backstage afterward, the actors and performers greeted the president. Marilyn, who had invited Isadore Miller to be her guest that evening, introduced him to Kennedy: “I’d like you to meet my former father-in-law,” she said proudly.
After the gala, a private reception was held at the East Side home of Arthur Krim and his wife, Mathilde, who recalled, “Marilyn came dressed in a body stocking covered with sequins, which looked as if they were just stuck to her skin because the net was a flesh color.” George Masters added that Marilyn “reveled in that Jean Louis gown. She was flamboyant but somehow elegant and subtle about her nudity, as if it were the most natural thing in the world not to wear underwear.” Her main concern that evening was to see that Isadore, amid the crushing crowd of guests, had a chair and a plate of food. She never abandoned him to strangers, nor did she wander among the crowd seeking small talk, praise or compliments.
In a way the evening was unimaginably important to Marilyn Monroe. Not only had the lost child found her momentary place in Camelot—she had also made real the recurring dream of her childhood. For there she was, all but nude before her adorers, utterly without shame, somehow as innocent as a jaybird. “There was a softness to her that was very appealing,” said Mathilde Krim. “She was—well, just extraordinarily beautiful.”
1. The meaning of the original Greek in II Timothy 4:7, and of Jerome’s later Latin rendering Cursum perficio, is “I complete the course [or race].” Centuries later, the verse was commonly used as a motto in European doorways to welcome travelers and pilgrims to places of refuge; it was then taken up and used in homes, the simple equivalent of the modern mat announcing “Welcome!” Gloomy symbol-seekers have read the motto as Marilyn’s prophecy of her death (or worse, her death-wish); in fact, it had been installed by the builder thirty years before.
2. See below, chapter 22, footnote 8.
3. The history of this fiction is traced in the Afterword to this book, “The Great Deception.”
4. On Monday and Tuesday, June 25 and 26, the attorney general was in Detroit, Chicago and Boulder addressing (among other groups) conferences of United States attorneys. On Tuesday afternoon, Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles, where he met with FBI and IRS agents to discuss matters of criminal intelligence. On Thursday morning, he departed Los Angeles for Oklahoma City, Nashville and Roanoke, whence he returned to Washington on June 30. On this entire week, the record is unambiguous. The National Archives; FBI Files #77-51387-274 and 260 (documenting the attorney general’s itinerary); and the Jerry Wald appointment books at the University of Southern California all confirm that the attorney general spent most of Wednesday afternoon, June 27, with Wald, discussing the possibility of a film based on Kennedy’s 1960 book, The Enemy Within.
5. Sidney Skolsky and all of Peter Lawford’s closest friends, including William Asher, Milton Ebbins and Joseph Naar, insist the Monroe-Kennedy friendship was platonic. Skolsky summed up their belief: “As for Robert Kennedy, she never mentioned him” (p. 234) and said that Norman Mailer, “writing about Bobby, put together purple prose to make greenbacks” (quoted in Wilson, p. 60)—an assertion Mailer himself admitted in 1973.
6. J. Edgar Hoover, who kept a detailed dossier on Marilyn since before her marriage to Miller, would very much have appreciated confirmation of rumors about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, but his files remained empty on the matter. “It would have been impossible for Hoover not to have known about such goings-on had they occurred,” said Edwin Guthman, “and he certainly would have used this information during Bobby’s later campaigns for office.”
7. To Isadore Miller on February 2, 1962: “Do give my invitation some serious thought because remember, you haven’t been west of the Rockies yet. But most of all, I would love to have you spend time with me. . . . I’ll sure enjoy seeing you. I send all my love and I miss you.” To Bobby Miller, same date: “I would love it if you and Janie [his sister] wanted to come for a few days or a week—you are welcome to stay as long as you want to. I will take care of your plane tickets and meet you at the airport. You and Janie are always welcome. I guess we are all a little sloppy about writing, but I think we all know what we mean to each other, don’t we? At least I know I love you kids and I want to be your friend and stay in touch. I love you and miss you both. Give my love to Janie too.”
8. That same year, as was subsequently documented in her divorce petition, Engelberg’s wife was maintained by him on appallingly massive doses of barbiturates and hypnotics—ostensibly to keep her calm during the trauma of the termination of their thirty-year marriage. But the result of this prodigal administration of dangerous drugs was very nearly disastrous.
9. “Not in her worst nightmare,” according to her confidante Susan Strasberg, “would Marilyn have wanted to be with JFK on any permanent basis. It was okay for one night to sleep with a charismatic president—and she loved the secrecy and drama of it. But he certainly wasn’t the kind of man she wanted for life, and she was very clear to us about this.”
10. Kennedy’s birthday was being celebrated ten days in advance of the date; that year he would turn forty-five.