Chapter Twenty - one
ON SUNDAY, MAY 20—the day following the great gala—Marilyn rushed back to Los Angeles, where she found Eunice Murray calmly cooking supper for her at Fifth Helena. The housekeeper had, it seems (or so she said), taken the check and dismissal as simply signifying time off for a vacation, and here she was, cheerfully back at her post. Marilyn, tired and frankly glad to have someone to awaken her next morning, to prepare the breakfast, make some calls and attend to some household details, tacitly rescinded the discharge, which was never again mentioned.
Next morning she was on the set, working eight hours after a cool reception from her producer, director and crew. They must have known of the threat against her, but the picture still had its own problems. For one thing, the script was unfinished—and they called her unprofessional, as Marilyn later told Paula sarcastically. She was, in fact, clear-headed in her suspicions against her team and the entire management at Fox: the latter’s incompetence during the last weeks of production and the sophomoric degrees of inefficiency on and off the set suggest that the plan was indeed simply to justify Gould’s order that Marilyn be dismissed and the picture shelved.
Despite all the commotion, all they could ask of Marilyn that Monday, May 21, was to do more retakes of her scenes with the children, for Dean Martin had come down with a cold. The production report for Tuesday notes that Martin “reported for work, but that due to Marilyn Monroe’s susceptibility and on the advice of her doctor, she refused to work with him until his recuperation.” But that day, too, she worked all morning with the children, completing medium and close shots for their poolside conversation. Martin was still down with his cold on Wednesday and Thursday and remained at home until Friday. Marilyn worked those three full days, and one of them, as everyone hoped, made immediate international news.
On Wednesday, May 23, no other actor was required on the set but Marilyn for the scene in which, as the long lost Ellen Arden, she was to take a midnight swim after her return home. As she did so, she was to be seen by her husband from his bedroom upstairs, where he was with his new wife; this was to lead to some silent comic interplay and gesticulating between them to prevent her being discovered. From nine in the morning to four in the afternoon of the twenty-third (with only a twenty-minute break for lunch), Marilyn remained in the pool, paddling, swimming, splashing and waving, while closeup, medium and long shots were taken again and yet again. In the script, she was to be swimming naked, with the illusion of nudity easily obtained by the flesh-colored, two-piece bikini Marilyn wore all day.
There was, however, a problem. When cinematographer William Daniels gazed through his viewfinder at the long shot of Marilyn with her back to the camera, sitting at the edge of the pool towel-drying her hair, he noticed that the back strap of the bikini’s top was clearly visible to the Technicolor camera. This he reported to Cukor, who approached Marilyn—who in turn readily tossed aside her bikini top for this simple, quick, rearview image. In a few moments the shot was easily made.
But then Marilyn had an idea, one entirely natural for the woman who had posed nude for Tom Kelley on red silk in 1949; who had her skirt blown high for Billy Wilder over a subway grating in 1954; and who most recently had appeared at a presidential party with the merest covering. The shots she suggested were not in the script (and, she knew, would never be approved by the Motion Picture Production Code in 1962). But for publicity—to advertise Something’s Got to Give all over the world—why not take several shots of her nude as she wrapped round herself the blue terry-cloth robe for the next sequence? She had been so many icons, after all: why not Venus Rising from the Waves? This would cost the picture not a cent, and it might bring in millions: Marilyn Monroe, soon to appear in Something’s Got to Give—and, it was (wrongly) implied, naked, just the way you see her now in a magazine.
Weinstein and Cukor thought this was inspired, and things happened quickly. Two free-lance photographers (William Woodfield and Lawrence Schiller) were hastily summoned to join the Fox studio photographer (James Mitchell). For just under an hour, many stills were made of Marilyn from various angles—but with nothing like total nudity, front or rear.
By the end of the day she was exhausted, but there was a burst of applause from the crew and even an embrace from Cukor. “Do you think this was in bad taste?” Marilyn asked Agnes Flanagan as she headed for her dressing room. “I told her,” said Agnes, a dignified Irish grandmother, “that there was nothing suggestive about it at all.”
On Thursday, May 24, Marilyn was back on the set for solo closeups and over-the-shoulder two-shots with Cyd Charisse—despite an earache from her watery scenes. Martin was in his fourth sick day and there were last-minute rearrangements, but no one seemed much concerned; the picture was only nine days behind schedule, and these could easily be justified (especially with this surprise new publicity campaign). The production required only a conclusion to the messy, tangled script. On Friday, May 25, ignoring a low-grade fever and a slight discharge from her right ear, Marilyn worked without complaint, joining Martin and Charisse for eight complicated shots. In these, she spoke with a brilliantly phony Swedish accent, Marilyn’s character trying to pass herself off as a foreign maid in her own home. The outtakes remain among the indisputable examples of her greatly underestimated talent: she wanted, Marilyn said, to do a sendup of every Garbo mimic in history, and that is just what she gave Cukor. Now he and Weinstein began to worry even more—that despite the rumblings from executive offices here and in New York, something might not have to give at all: they could be getting a film worth saving.
Marilyn spent the weekend mostly alone, but she and Pat shopped for food on Saturday; the atmosphere, they agreed, was far pleasanter without Eunice lurking on weekends. Marilyn had placed a cotton wad in her ear and was taking antibiotics she had left over from her bout of sinusitis, but by Sunday there was a frank infection and her temperature had risen to one hundred two. A massive injection of penicillin cured her in record time, but she could not report for work on Monday.
On Tuesday, May 29, she and Dean Martin worked six hours on dialogue, doing forty-six takes of five shots and completing one and a quarter pages of script. As the outtakes reveal, Marilyn worked the scene carefully, executing a brief but gradually building anger, her voice always controlled, her eyes slowly blazing with resentment at an accusation of infidelity. Each time Cukor cut in, asking for a retake or giving direction, Marilyn listened patiently, sometimes asking a question, always nodding her agreement and eager to give what was best for the scene.
On Wednesday, Memorial Day, there was no call for anyone to report for work. On Thursday, May 31, Marilyn acted for the first time with her friend Wally Cox, for whom she had lobbied in the role of the shoe clerk roped in to pretend that he had been marooned on a desert island with her for five years. Not only was this an astonishing day’s work—thirty-eight takes of four setups, resulting in two and a half pages of filmed script—it was also one of the most hilarious scenes Marilyn Monroe ever acted for film. Wearing a cashmere suit with a mink collar and matching mink hat, she whispered, cajoled, begged the Milquetoast character to lunch with her—all the while trying a pair of shoes two sizes too small (“Well, go barefoot for five years!”). Once again, she made an indifferent scene memorable by investing it with just the right, light comic touch—her voice lilting but confident, her gestures properly elegant. Had Something’s Got to Give ever been released, the public would at least have seen Marilyn Monroe at arguably the loveliest point in her life.
The following day, June 1, 1962, Marilyn turned thirty-six. Evelyn Moriarty had planned a birthday celebration, but Cukor refused to allow any merriment until he had a full day’s work from his cast. In an overlong, actionless scene with Wally Cox and Dean Martin, Marilyn gave one of the subtlest performances of her career; it was also, alas, her final performance in a motion picture. With few words but with mock innocence, she tried to convince Martin that the meek Cox was her island partner. Marilyn had only to smile, to turn slightly to the left, to glance ever so lazily to the right—and there was film acting of a high caliber indeed, the result of fifteen years of hard effort at her craft. Here were gazes and intonations signifying wistfulness and victory, witty ruse and earnest yearning to be reunited with her husband: somehow, despite all the stress and pain of the last two months, she gave a performance of which any actress could be forever proud.
At six o’clock, Evelyn was permitted to wheel out a cake she had purchased that morning at the Farmers Market. Sparklers glittered atop it and the traditional song echoed as Allan Snyder and Wally Cox poured champagne for everyone. Eunice angled her way onto the lot, drifting through distractedly as if she were a slightly boozy fairy godmother, and left saying nothing. But birthday or not, people departed quickly—it was Friday evening, someone said. Something was dreadfully wrong; an unusually tense atmosphere prevailed. In a half-hour, the party was over, and there were only herself, Wally and Evelyn left, sipping Dom Perignon from paper cups. Marilyn and Wally climbed into the limousine; she had with her the wardrobe’s cashmere suit and mink hat. There were no plans for the evening—Joe had put through a call from Europe, where he was on business with Monette—and so Marilyn had accepted an invitation to appear at a fund-raising baseball game for charity. She looked magnificent, posed happily for newsmen and retired alone at ten o’clock.
However memorable her appearance and significant her work that week, she must have been miserably lonely by Friday night, not to say frightened of losing her job. But most of all, as she told friends in telephone calls that evening, she was enraged at Greenson, on whom she had been conditioned to rely completely. To her, it seemed the ultimate act of betrayal: an axe was about to fall, and she had no defenses against it. Indeed, how else could she have felt after being so long a member of his family? Weinstein and Rudin had been right: a film at this time of her life, when she was so deeply (if ill-advisedly) committed to therapy, had been unwise, as even her tendency to a series of real physical maladies indicated. That she acquitted herself so brilliantly was a testament to her essential inner strength, her willingness to work, her desire not to let others down.
“What happened that weekend [after her birthday], I don’t know, but to me it was more important than the weekend she died.” Thus spoke Henry Weinstein almost thirty years later.
At the time, he could not have known the bizarre events that were just beginning. Early Saturday morning, June 2, weeping uncontrollably, Marilyn telephoned Greenson’s son and daughter, Dan and Joan, who had been instructed by their father to respond if she called; once again, it is hard to comprehend the appropriateness of involving his children in what Greenson himself called a dangerous case. They entered Marilyn’s bedroom, where they found her indescribably lonely and depressed, then giddy and disoriented—the classic signs of Dexamyl overdose. Following their father’s instructions, they called Milton Wexler, who sped to the house, found “a dangerous arsenal . . . a formidable array of sedatives on her bedside table and swept them all into his black bag” (thus Eunice). That night (actually June 3, at one in the morning), Dr. Milton Uhley was summoned, in the absence of Engelberg, to provide sedation.
On Monday, June 4, Marilyn, sober but livid with rage, felt no obligation to work in a situation from which she felt entirely disconnected. Eunice, unaccustomed to seeing her in such undiluted anger, put through a call to Greenson in Switzerland, but he had not arrived yet from Israel. At the same time, Paula—who had flown back to Los Angeles and was in residence at the Chateau Marmont, prepared to help—telephoned Fox that Marilyn would not report until she had discussions with her advisers. Prudently, Paula did not add her agreement with Marilyn that she ought not to work on a picture from which she was about to be dismissed. Marilyn, meanwhile, was on the telephone to Lee and to the Rostens, and to Ralph Roberts, Pat Newcomb, Allan Snyder and Agnes Flanagan. She had, it may be presumed, been taught in therapy to assert herself: now she was assuring that her friends knew how bereft she felt. That day, two pages of the script for Something’s Got to Give were filmed; there would be no more work, although the picture was not formally shut down for a week. Just before six that afternoon, Phil Feldman, vice-president of business operations at the studio, telephoned Milton Rudin, who could provide no answer as to whether Marilyn would be on the set Tuesday or Wednesday.
On Tuesday evening, June 5, Fox warned Rudin that they were prepared to file suit against Marilyn for breach of contract, to which Rudin replied that he understood their position, and all he could say was that at Marilyn’s request he had telephoned Greenson in Switzerland, requesting that he return to facilitate a resolution to the situation. Weinstein, frantic, had also called Greenson, who was indeed en route even as they spoke: he arrived in Los Angeles the evening of Wednesday, June 6. “Fox needed a reason to shut down that picture,” according to Evelyn Moriarty, who, along with the rest of the cast and crew, was piecing together the week’s events. Paula, weary, called her and asked, “Evelyn, do we have any friends?” Well may she have asked.
Greenson went directly from the airport to Fifth Helena on the evening of June 6, then went home, and early next morning was back at Fifth Helena. And at this point events took a grotesque turn.
The contradictions in Greenson’s conduct must be faced in all their complexity. On the one hand, he considered Marilyn’s condition so perilous that he left specific instructions for her care with his children, three colleagues and his brother-in-law, her attorney. Having made the decision to depart, he then leaped at once to return, abandoning his wife and doing exactly what a therapist in such a situation is trained to avoid: playing the savior and making himself central in her life. Marilyn’s anger notwithstanding, he could have left her career problems in the hands of Rudin and Fox, where they were rightfully being adjudicated; that, however, would have been to admit peers—for him, competition.
What transpired at their reunion cannot be determined, but his attitude toward Marilyn was clear from a letter he wrote two weeks later to a friend named Lucille Ostrow, which reveals the extent of his rage at himself, at Marilyn and at a situation he had permitted to go beyond control. He had not only missed his vacation, he complained to Ostrow: he also missed a few days in New York planned as an interval—a business meeting with Leo Rosten, a party in Greenson’s honor to be given by Dore Schary and an appointment with his publisher. All these he canceled, he said, to rescue his patient. Greenson added that he felt like an idiot, for on his return Marilyn recovered quickly and was delighted to be rid of the burden of a terrible picture. Furious for the inconvenience, Greenson ended the letter by saying that he had canceled his other patients and was now seeing only this schizophrenic one regularly again: she had, in other words, completely taken over his time and his life—but (one might ask) at whose insistence? He was, Greenson told Ostrow, depressed and lonely; very likely without yet admitting it to himself, he bitterly resented what he had allowed Marilyn to do to him and his family. The letter, dated and postmarked June 22, 1962, is a bitter diatribe of therapist against patient.
“Everybody [on Something’s Got to Give] was aware that Greenson had put Marilyn in a cocoon-like situation,” said Walter Bernstein.
I always felt that she had become an investment to people like him—an investment not only financially, in caring for her, but even in the fabrication of her illness. It had become a need for him and others that she be considered sick, dependent and needy. There was something sinister about Ralph Greenson. It was well known that he exerted enormous influence over her.
Susan Strasberg agreed: his close involvement with Marilyn was an open secret no one really discussed.
But the influence and involvement then led beyond resentment to outrage and anger—indeed, to a rage that far exceeded hers. “If I behaved in a way which hurt her,” he wrote to Kris on August 20, “she acted as though it was the end of the world and could not rest until peace had been re-established, but peace could be reconciliation and death.” This odd comment was followed by his admission that he became “impatient with her constant complaints” and that he was “being led by countertransference feelings.”
But it was Greenson himself who had a lifelong tendency to irrational fits of anger. An actor and writer who sought his help was told that he ought to go elsewhere because the man “needed a psychiatrist who could love him. You don’t understand—psychiatrists must love their patients.” The young man replied that he understood perfectly if “love” meant concern, but that otherwise this advice did not seem right. “But then Greenson became a violent, screaming hysteric. He completely lost control, and in fact it frightened me. ‘How dare you challenge me!’ he shouted. I am the expert, not you! You are wrong, you are mad—you are a schizophrenic!’ ” The man found Greenson, after three meetings, a “profoundly unstable man. And then I learned that most of his patients were bored, tennis-playing Beverly Hills matrons or movie stars, and he hated them—in fact, he made no secret of it.” Other ex-clients felt uncomfortable at the constant intrusion of sex and questions about intimate sexual matters, whenever possible, into therapeutic discussions.
The anger was evident with peers and friends, too: Ralph Greenson was simply not a man to be challenged. In 1957, he received a letter from his old friend John Frosch, editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, reporting that an essay Greenson had submitted was not suitable for publication in its present form. This infuriated Greenson, and he answered in angry disbelief, wondering why Frosch was treating him so badly and why he bore such an obvious vendetta. On February 4, 1957, Frosch replied, shocked at his friend’s tone, saying that Greenson was behaving in a completely irrational manner, that he saw this as strictly a professional decision. Greenson should consider revising his article and resubmitting it, Frosch concluded, but that never happened.
There are several primary documents connecting Marilyn’s final dismissal from Something’s Got to Give with Greenson’s return from Switzerland and the events of June 7 and 8: Greenson’s letters to Ostrow and Kris; the memoranda of the Fox meetings on June 5, 6, and 7; Eunice Murray’s incomplete 1973 memoir; and the account of an eminent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon named Michael Gurdin.
Dr. Gurdin became part of the story on the morning of June 7, when Greenson brought Marilyn to his office. “She was disheveled,” Gurdin recalled,
and there were black and blue marks on both lower lids, poorly covered by makeup. The story Greenson gave me was that she was in her shower, slipped and fell. Now it was obvious to me that Miss Monroe was under the influence of drugs—her voice was thick and slurred. But her major concern was that she had a picture commitment, and that she was fearful that her nose was broken. She actually talked very little, and the questions I put to her regarding her injury were answered by Dr. Greenson. She did not answer. I did not take any X-rays because she did not want them. I examined her carefully, and I could find no evidence of a fracture.
According to Dr. Gurdin, Marilyn’s injuries could indeed have been the result of a fall, as he was told,
but it is possible that she could have been struck on the face. Either a fall or an assault would give those same signs, for if an injury is sustained to the nose to have any bleeding under the skin, you won’t see it on your nose, you’ll see it under the eyes—because the tissues under the eyes are very soft and loose, and blood escapes into them. Also, there’s a direct connection between the tissue under the nose and eyes.
Once Gurdin had pronounced Marilyn fracture-free, a flurry of telephone calls was made. First, Greenson telephoned Rudin (who was at Lake Tahoe), who asked his partner Martin Gang to call Feldman and report that Greenson, having returned, was now in charge of Marilyn’s relationship with the studio. Since she had accused Rudin of being “with them” (i.e., of siding with Fox rather than with her) and since Greenson was “the medical member of the team in charge,” Greenson would determine Marilyn’s ability to return to the picture—which, he said, might occur within the week. Greenson asked to be quoted as follows: “I am convinced that she can finish the picture in the normal course,” a statement vague enough to come from any politician. Greenson then telephoned Eunice and instructed her to say nothing to the press, nor to anyone who called from the Arthur Jacobs office, from New York or from the studio. He then advised her that the injury to Marilyn’s face was no cause for concern and she should forget about it. Nothing was communicated to Weinstein.
In all these calls and announcements, there is clearly a serious problem. Greenson never mentioned Marilyn’s accident and their visit to Gurdin, an occurrence that could ironically have helped her. Fox rightly expected a reason to be offered for her absence that week, but they received none. Instead of buying time for another week by simply showing Fox that a woman with bruises was hardly fit for the camera, not a word was spoken by Greenson (the only one besides Gurdin who knew about the accident, if such it was). Just as crucial, his letters to Kris and Ostrow (and Murray’s memoir) are noteworthy for their presentation of Marilyn as a gravely ill patient, a schizophrenic and a desperate abuser of dangerous drugs: Would not his account of her nearly tragic, drug-induced accident have supported these allegations? She could have sustained career-threatening if not life-threatening injury, after all.
Why, then, did Greenson not mention this accident, telling Fox straightaway that Marilyn had hurt herself? Why did Greenson not invite a studio doctor to come to Fifth Helena to see for himself that Marilyn was unable to work that day and the next? Why was neither Pat Newcomb nor her boss, Arthur Jacobs, informed of the injury? It was their job to finesse such delicate matters with the press and public should the news somehow be leaked.
Would not Greenson have telephoned Engelberg if he found Marilyn injured, or taken her to Engelberg’s office? To avoid publicity at all cost, would it not have better suited his purposes to have a doctor come to the house? No, these were not options because Marilyn herself—not hours but moments after the blow—had insisted on seeing the man who had cared for her face years earlier. Had the accident occurred as Greenson told Gurdin, why was it not mentioned by Eunice in her memoir; why did Greenson not use it to help keep Fox at bay? And why did Marilyn, who no longer trusted her advisers, not insist on attending the crucial luncheon meeting at Fox the next day, the conference that would determine her fate and that of the picture? Doubtless because she was temporarily disfigured (and very likely sedated).
There can be only one explanation. Greenson wanted to confide in no one and wished to prevent Marilyn being seen or questioned about the injury by Gurdin or anyone else for one reason only: he was the one responsible for it. Exhausted, frustrated, highly strung, confident of his authority to the point of egomania, he was a man known to become enraged when challenged. Furious at Marilyn for having sabotaged his vacation, having disobeyed his orders, causing him professional and personal embarrassment before his family and the studio and then saying that she was (thus the letter to Ostrow) not very ill after all and would be glad to be rid of the picture, Greenson had become violent and struck her. As long before with Joe, she silently endured the moment of abuse, convinced that she had been a naughty child and that punishment was due.
Hairstylist Sidney Guilaroff, not a man to be lightly dismissed, came to visit Marilyn that weekend but was brusquely turned away by Greenson, who came to Fifth Helena for weekend sessions on June 9 and 10: “I went to see her,” Guilaroff recalled, “but Greenson kept me out. He kept a lot of people from her.” For over a week, she was virtually incarcerated at home until her bruises healed and so was forced to decline several social invitations she might otherwise have attended. Among these was an invitation from Pat and Peter Lawford, who were to be guests of honor at the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy in Virginia. Her telegram of regret, dated June 13, linked her struggle with Fox to the famous “Freedom Riders” fighting on behalf of civil rights for minorities:
Dear Attorney General and Mrs. Kennedy:
I would have been delighted to have accepted your invitation honoring Pat and Peter Lawford. Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle.
Marilyn Monroe
A second visit to Gurdin, on June 14, confirmed that all would soon be well. During that week, there were visits by Greenson and Engelberg, who later submitted bills (Engelberg’s were for injections).
The meetings were held at Fox on Friday, June 8, and to them Greenson thus brought a double burden. He had to convince hostile studio executives that he could deliver Monroe to the set; and he had to prevent knowledge of her injuries—which, if ever known, would ignite a scandal and ruin his career forever, making Marilyn, in the bargain, a more sympathetic figure before the studio and the public.
Greenson performed brilliantly. He, Rudin, Feldman and Frank Ferguson (an assistant secretary of Fox) met in the executive offices, where Greenson began by stating that his patient had endured two unfortunate incidents: a virus she contracted in New York and (his ego ever uninjured) his absence from her life. He added that Pat Newcomb was “dispensable” as publicist and Paula Strasberg as coach (doubtless because, like Ralph Roberts, they were friends of Marilyn and disliked him). In addition, he reminded them that he had pulled Marilyn through a crisis once before, during The Misfits, and he could do so again.
The discussion continued along these lines, and when Feldman attempted to raise the stakes, asking if Marilyn would accept a new director or cameraman, Greenson was unfazed. He said, according to Feldman’s detailed notes, that he would “be able to get his patient to go along with any reasonable request and although he did not want us to deem his relationship as a Svengali one, he in fact could persuade her to anything reasonable that he wanted.”1
Continuing this expression of egomania, Greenson astonished everyone by saying that he was ready to assume responsibility for all creative areas of the picture: to select the new director and cameraman, to decide which scenes Marilyn would or would not perform and which takes would finally be printed. “I pointed out to Dr. Greenson,” noted Feldman, “that although I was sure he knew his business, I agreed with Mickey [Rudin] that he [Greenson] was not necessarily expert in our motion picture business.”
The meeting, which began at half past twelve, continued through luncheon. A few minutes before four, when Rudin returned to his office, there was already a message awaiting him from Fox: the studio considered Marilyn Monroe in breach of contract and was prepared to proceed with all available legal remedies. In fact, they had so proceeded on Thursday afternoon, and thus the Friday meeting was an empty formality. Moments before the Los Angeles County Court closed that June 7, a suit was filed against Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc., and its employee Marilyn Monroe, in the amount of $500,000. Sheilah Graham, who got the news from Henry Weinstein on Thursday, published it in her column in the Citizen-News that night; otherwise it was unreported in the press until Friday and Saturday, June 8 and 9.
When the news broke widely over that weekend, Marilyn was, as Allan Snyder, Marjorie Plecher and others remembered, unutterably depressed, for she could not believe that Fox would go so far as to fire her. She had, after all, made twenty of her twenty-nine films there and longed to believe that at last she was valued and had friends.
The dismissal, said Peter Levathes in an official statement, “was made necessary because of Miss Monroe’s repeated wilful breaches of her contract. No justification was given for her failure to report for photography on many occasions. The studio has suffered losses through these absences.” This was a simple case of muscular exertion by Levathes, acting at last on orders from Gould, Loeb and the rest of the board. Then, Levathes seemed to admit that Twentieth Century–Fox was itself a place fit only for madmen: “We’ve let the inmates run the asylum,” he added, which meant that actors were lunatics and executives little more than keepers of a madhouse—not an allusion likely to win staff support.
Weinstein, years later, offered his own explanation, and it was at least partly correct. The real reason Marilyn was fired, he said, was that “Cleopatra was way behind schedule and costing millions, and here we had this small picture behind schedule. It looked as if Skouras and his appointed head Levathes were losing control of their talent. And so she was a pawn—an interesting pawn, a sad pawn, it’s tragic, it’s funny—but a pawn. And that’s the real Hollywood story.” And, he might have added, it is often enough the story of Hollywood.
“They just didn’t understand,” said David Brown, a veteran of problems more difficult even than this,
and they decided to play hardball like businessmen: “We’ll sue you. . . . We’ll hold you to every last clause. . . . You’ll never work in this town again,” and so forth and so on. These executives were storm troopers delivering messages. It was all so unnecessary.
It was also very soon regretted by the men at Fox, who scrambled to correct a potentially disastrous oversight.
That the company had much earlier begun negotiations for Marilyn’s replacement on the picture was obvious on Saturday, when newspapers showed a photo of George Cukor, smiling too broadly with Lee Remick, who was signed on Saturday to replace Marilyn; in fact, Remick landed the role only after Kim Novak and Shirley MacLaine turned it down. And with this single announcement about Remick’s employment, the men at Fox revealed their delirious incompetence, for Dean Martin’s contract gave him the right to approve his leading lady. Loyal to Marilyn, Martin at once telephoned his agent Herman Citron and announced he would not proceed with Something’s Got to Give—news that touched and cheered Marilyn to the point of tears.
The roller coaster continued its crazy route. Early Monday morning, a meeting room at Fox was crowded with Levathes, Cukor, Feldman, Martin, Citron and casting director Owen McLean. The purpose was to convince Martin not to force the studio to close down the picture; and Levathes begged him not to reject Lee Remick. But Martin replied that Levathes was not quite accurate: he was not rejecting Remick, he simply would not do the picture without Marilyn, for whose participation he had signed to do this silly movie in the first place. “Mr. Martin,” reported the transcript of the meeting,
said that he felt the chemistry between himself and Miss Monroe was right and that was why he took the picture and for no other reason, and that Miss Monroe meant a lot more at the box office than Miss Remick and that the point of the end of the story seemed to be that he would leave Miss Charisse for Miss Monroe—and that therefore this was not a role for Miss Remick, and that he wanted to do the picture only with Miss Monroe.
That was that. The studio was caught short by Dean Martin’s loyalty, his insistence on his contractual rights and his canny sense of the best casting.
At this point, the vigilant Milton Rudin stepped in. He called Feldman on Monday afternoon to ask why he had not been informed that a lawsuit had been filed, since he assumed conversations were continuing in good faith. He then rightly asked why Fox was giving out derogatory statements to the press about Marilyn, since he fully expected her to return to work very soon. Contrariwise, Rudin added, he had advised Arthur Jacobs and his staff to issue no defensive publicity at all on Marilyn’s behalf, nor to provide any reply to the many calls everyone was now receiving. The conversation concluded when Rudin asked Feldman who was to replace Martin if they went forward with Remick. Feldman replied that he did not know, whereupon “Mr. Rudin said maybe we ought to get President Kennedy.”
Bumbling along with their strong-arm tactics, Fox instructed their law firm (Musick, Peeler and Garrett) to continue to turn a skirmish into outright war. That same Monday, an amended lawsuit was filed, raising the ante against Marilyn from $500,000 to $750,000. This they had to do very hurriedly, before anyone learned that their suit from the previous week contained an error that could have led to an instant dismissal of the case: the first brief claimed that “since April 16, the defendant failed, refused and neglected to render services” on Something’s Got to Give. Marilyn had not begun work on the picture until April 30, after which she willingly and satisfactorily rendered very much service indeed. This clause, omitted from the June 7 suit, was supplemented by an inclusion of the May 16 warning.
Nothing, Fox seemed to reason, would succeed like overkill, and so on June 19 they continued in their litigious actions, suing Dean Martin (whose company, Claude Productions, was producing the picture) for $3,339,000—the entire cost of the shelved production as they then computed it. This, like the suits against Marilyn, was eventually abandoned by Fox when an entire new platoon of executives strode through the studio gates. The shakeup began before the end of June, when the (forced) retirement of Spryos Skouras was announced.
Meantime, Peter Levathes quickly realized that in abandoning Something’s Got to Give and losing Monroe and Martin, the company was also losing the fantastic publicity from the photos of the swimming scene and the peekaboo nude shots—glorious color images that by this time had appeared worldwide. Where and when, it was being asked, would this film be released? And as for the matter of cost, Lee Remick came at no bargain price: her salary was $80,000, and more than fifteen days of footage would have to be scrapped. It would in the long run be easier to find the budget for, essentially, a new picture.
Thus (hooray for Hollywood), discussions for an eventual resumption of Something’s Got to Give were resumed just a week after Marilyn’s dismissal, as negotiations began for a complete script revision by Hal Kanter. At the same time, there were telephone calls and meetings to determine how Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin could be brought back in October, after Martin had completed another scheduled picture. “When [Levathes] made his announcement that he was going to fire Marilyn,” said Nunnally Johnson, “I phoned him to suggest that if anyone was to be fired it should be the director. It was Marilyn who brought people into the theaters, not this director.” All this was being discussed throughout June and July, despite the objections of Milton Gould, who left the board of Fox on the departure of Skouras.
Meanwhile, Marilyn was far from idle, for there were discussions about other films, too. In addition, the brouhaha with Fox and subsequent news of renewed negotiations led every magazine in America to ask for a photo story and interview. For those she agreed to accommodate, her good friend Allan Snyder was as usual asked to do her makeup. About the same time, Truman Capote (on familiar terms with the messy business of serious drug addiction) was surprised to find that “she had never looked better . . . and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly anymore.” As Marilyn herself said at this time, “There’s a future, and I can’t wait to get to it.”
By June 23, a week after her second visit to Gurdin, her bruises had vanished, and Marilyn met photographer Bert Stern, on assignment from Vogue, for the first of five photo sessions between that day and July 12; she also spent three days (June 29 through July 1) on and around Santa Monica beach with photographer George Barris for a Cosmopolitan photoessay. Believing that she was at her best posing rather than acting, and proud of her lithe and youthful figure, she was as ever the most patient and cooperative model, at ease with her lover the still camera, for which she had to remember no dialogue. For these long sessions, Marilyn wore mink for glamour shots, cavorted in bikinis and, draped in diaphanous veils and beneath a white sheet, posed seminude.
“She was very natural, without the affectation of a star complex,” according to Stern. “There was a rare quality that I haven’t seen before or since—as if there were no other person in the world while you were there. Marilyn devoted herself single-mindedly to the task and was ornery or impatient only when she was fed up with the glamour shots, the fashion shots Vogue wanted. She did not seem depressed or anxious about anything: she sipped her Dom Perignon and was delighted to be doing what she most enjoyed.”
“How’s this for thirty-six?” she asked Stern, holding a sheer scarf over her naked breasts. George Masters, who was her hairstylist for the Stern sittings, recalled that “she said she never felt better, and she looked utterly fantastic, like something shining and ethereal. This was a lady who talked a lot that week about the future. She had no time for brooding over the past, even the recent past.”
Regarding her age and her prospects, Marilyn was frank and articulate when speaking to a reporter: “I’m thirty-six years old,” she said,
I don’t mind the age. I like the view from here. The future is here for me, and I have to make the most of it—as every woman must. So when you hear all this talk of how tardy I am, of how often it seems that I make people wait, remember—I’m waiting too. I’ve been waiting all my life.
She continued to speak with quiet sincerity, but her tone changed. For a moment it was as if Cherie had sprung from some lost scene of Bus Stop and was alive again in Marilyn:
You don’t know what it’s like to have all that I have and not be loved and know happiness. All I ever wanted out of life is to be nice to people and have them be nice to me. It’s a fair exchange. And I’m a woman. I want to be loved by a man, from his heart, as I would love him from mine. I’ve tried, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The reporter naturally followed up with questions about her marriages, but Marilyn was as always the soul of discretion. Joe was “Mr. DiMaggio,” and Arthur “Mr. Miller,” and she would not be led to a discussion of her private life. In the fifteen years he knew her, said Allan Snyder, he never heard an unkind or vindictive word about an ex-husband or a former lover—not even about those professionals who treated her unfairly. “To think of Marilyn Monroe calling a press conference to air her grievances against anyone is laughably out of character. Why, she wouldn’t even say a single bad word to a friend or a reporter!” Nor did she extend a problematic relationship with an individual to include that person’s family: on July 19, showing her gratitude for their concern during Greenson’s absence, Marilyn invited Dan and Joan (without their parents, it should be noted) to Fifth Helena for a casual supper celebrating Joan’s birthday.
Marilyn recognized that something was askew in her relationship with Greenson, for she confided to friends that she felt it was unhealthy for her to depend on someone whose attitude and actions were unpredictable (she provided no details) and with whom she seemed to be making no progress. But in the paradoxical way of many patients in therapy, she continued to consult him daily during July. Greenson had, after all, successfully convinced Marilyn of her need of him. And in this regard, he enlisted Hyman Engelberg as accomplice.
According to invoices later submitted, Engelberg visited Marilyn at home every day but six during July: except for the fourth, the sixth through the ninth and the sixteenth, she received injections—liver and vitamin shots, she said. But these transformed her mood and energy with alarming rapidity. “She asked to postpone our talk,” recalled Richard Meryman, who arrived late one afternoon for the second of a series of interviews for Life. “She was tired out, she said,” after meetings at Fox. But then they were interrupted by the arrival of Engelberg: Marilyn bounded out to the kitchen, received a shot and returned to Meryman—suddenly eager to talk on and on, which she did until midnight and after. That evening (unlike the other meetings) her speech was rapid and disjointed—hardly the effect of “liver and vitamin shots.”
These were Engelberg’s so-called youth shots. When Pat Newcomb learned of them, she told Marilyn to remember she was only thirty-six, “but she implied that whatever she was receiving was going to keep her young. Of course it was hard to argue with her, because she looked so great—better than I’d ever seen her in films.” But this was cause for alarm, for Engelberg tracked down Marilyn wherever she was to provide the injections: Pat never forgot the day he found the two women at a Brentwood restaurant, where “he took her back to some private place to give her the shot.” In his way, Engelberg was clearly as proprietary with Marilyn as Greenson; his first wife recalled him almost dancing with schoolboyish glee, showing off to his friends and announcing as he shook a set of keys, “I have access to Marilyn Monroe’s apartment,” and then, “I have the keys to Marilyn’s house! When therapy or the usual dose of Nembutal failed to put Marilyn to sleep, Greenson routinely telephoned Engelberg, who in 1961 dashed down from his house on St. Ives Drive to Doheny, and in 1962 made the longer trip to Fifth Helena. Greenson was quite open about the arrangement: as he said, he had an internist provide the injections “so that I had nothing to do with the actual handling of medication.”
The issue of her doctors and her work may have been among the items on her agenda when Marilyn placed a total of eight telephone calls that summer to the office of her new friend, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. According to Pat Newcomb and Edwin Guthman, their conversations were simply social, friendly calls, brief and uncomplicated, for they were not encouraged by the busy Mr. Kennedy. But he had assured her during their last meeting in June that he was indeed interested in her career and concerned for her health during and after the trials of Something’s Got to Give. In light of their several conversations about matters political and social at two previous dinners, Kennedy may not have anticipated that Marilyn, from afar, would depend on his compassion and encouragement in her private life, too. According to Edwin Guthman, however, there was never time in Kennedy’s office for him to devote to lengthy social calls, and Marilyn was gently but firmly discouraged from prolonging their conversations.
In support of this, the telephone records document very brief calls. On Monday, June 25, Marilyn called Kennedy’s office to confirm his presence at the Lawfords’ on Wednesday evening and to invite him and the Lawfords to visit her home for a drink before dinner; she spoke only with his secretary, Angie Novello, for one minute. On Monday, July 2, she placed two calls, again to Novello and for the same length of time. The remainder of the calls were placed during the last two weeks of July, only one of them lasting more than one minute: on the thirtieth, Marilyn called Kennedy to say that she was sorry to have missed his Los Angeles speech the previous weekend; she had gone to Lake Tahoe.2 These calls and four meetings comprise the entire relationship between the two.
During July, Marilyn relied on three sources of encouragement: friends like Ralph Roberts and Allan Snyder (and, by phone, Norman Rosten in Brooklyn); the admiration and encouragement of a few journalists and photographers; and the return to her life of Joe DiMaggio.
“We often stopped in at her house in the evening for a drink in June and July,” according to Allan Snyder and Marjorie Pelcher. “She was in very good spirits, showing us her newest addition to the house—some tiles, a carpet and a new chair.”
Since his return from Europe, Joe and Marilyn had frequently exchanged telephone calls, and he visited her once in June (on the twentieth) and twice in July (on the eighth and twenty-first); as all her friends knew, Joe’s presence and concern were her great strength, and ever since he rescued her from Payne Whitney they had maintained constant contact. Now, they shared simple suppers on the floor of her living room, since the shipment of Mexican furniture was delayed; they rented bicycles at the Hans Ohrt Bicycle Shop in Brentwood and freewheeled along San Vicente Boulevard toward the ocean; and they shopped together.
Joe and Marilyn seemed much like the happy couple of ten years ago—but they were more serene, both of them respectful of their differences, he less alarmed by her public persona, yet somehow touched by her essential sweetness and simplicity, and perhaps impressed with her courage and core of strength. He agreed with her concern about the ongoing therapy with Greenson, and promised to support whatever decision she made.
A decade had made a difference. Joe sat quietly, nodding appreciatively as she purchased an entire new wardrobe in Beverly Hills, at Saks Fifth Avenue and Jax: cashmere sweaters; blouses; two evening dresses; unfussy, spike-heeled shoes; a half-dozen pairs of pants in various pastel colors. The morning of July 21, he brought her home from Cedars of Lebanon after yet another procedure to alleviate her chronic endometriosis.3 As subsequent events revealed, his presence then must have marked a major step forward in the reunion of Joe with Marilyn, for the following week he informed Monette that he was resigning his position and would no longer be working for the company after the end of July.
As for the interviews, it is no surprise that Marilyn was most articulate, secure and frank in Engelberg’s absence. On the fourth, fifth, seventh and ninth of July, for example, she gave what was her last interview, for Life magazine, a series of conversations conducted by Richard Meryman at Fifth Helena. Only during the second meeting, after Engelberg’s visit and treatment, were her remarks unusable; the final draft was drawn from the other three, during which Marilyn was at her best:
• Regarding some unflattering remarks in the gossip columns: “I really resent the way the press has been saying I’m depressed and in a slump, as if I’m finished. Nothing’s going to sink me, although it might be kind of a relief to be finished with movie-making. That kind of work is like a hundred-yard dash and then you’re at the finish line, and you sigh and say you’ve made it. But you never have. There’s another scene and another film, and you have to start all over again.”
• Leading Meryman on a tour of her home, she pointed out her plans for a small guest suite, “a place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble. Maybe they’ll want to live here where they won’t be bothered till things are okay for them.”
• On fame: “What goes with it can be a burden. Real beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived. Glamour can be manufactured. Fame is certainly only a cause for temporary and partial happiness—not for a daily diet, it’s not what fulfills you. It warms you a bit, but the warming is only temporary. When you’re famous every weakness is exaggerated. Fame will go by and—so long, fame, I’ve had you! I’ve always known it was fickle. It was something I experienced, but it’s not where I live.”
• Replying to Meryman’s question as to how she “cranked herself up” to do a scene: “I don’t crank anything—I’m not a Model T. Excuse me, but I think that’s kind of disrespectful to refer to it that way. I’m trying to work at an art form, not in a manufacturing establishment.”
• On her chronic tardiness: “Successful, happy and on time—those are all the glib American clichés. I don’t want to be late, but I usually am, much to my regret. Often, I’m late because I’m preparing a scene, maybe preparing too much sometimes. But I’ve always felt that even in the slightest scene the people ought to get their money’s worth. And this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best. When they go to see me and look up at the screen, they don’t know I was late. And by that time, the studio has forgotten all about it and is making money. Oh, well.”
• On her recent troubles at Fox: “Executives can get colds and stay home and phone in—but the actor? How dare you get a cold or a virus! I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection! I’m there to give a performance, not to be disciplined by a studio. This isn’t supposed to be a military school, after all.”
• On being a sex symbol: “A sex symbol becomes a thing, and I just hate to be a thing. You’re always running into people’s unconscious. It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, but you also like to be accepted for your own sake. I don’t look on myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have, including one corporation in particular which shall be nameless. If I’m sounding ‘picked on,’ I think I have been.”
• On her interest in social and humanitarian causes: “What the world needs now is a greater feeling of kinship. We are all brothers, after all—and that includes movie stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs—everyone. That’s what I’m working on, working to understand.”
• On her future: “I want to be an artist and an actress with integrity. As I said once before, I don’t care about the money. I just want to be wonderful.”
But Marilyn had been burned so often by the press that she seemed not to trust Meryman entirely, and by the conclusion of their sessions she seemed to him cool and withdrawn. When photographer Allan Grant arrived to take the photos that would accompany the interview, Marilyn was, as Pat and Eunice recalled, in a giddy mood, making funny faces and joking. “What are you, some kind of a nut?” Meryman asked with remarkable insensitivity. This stopped her cold, for his remark had obviously hurt, and she was wary when he delivered a transcript of their conversation on July 9.
Marilyn requested only one cut from her taped remarks: “She asked me to take out a remark she had made about quietly giving money to needy individuals.” Like the best of herself, her charity would remain private, a secret between her and those she longed to help. She walked with him to the driveway, and then, just as he was about to depart, she stepped forward. “Please,” she said in a whisper, “please don’t make me a joke.”
After completing the month’s scheduled photo sessions and interviews, Marilyn and her old friend Sidney Skolsky were reunited—the first meeting in over a year—for a project that had long been important for both of them: he would produce and she would star in a film of Jean Harlow’s life. But first they would need the cooperation of Harlow’s mother, “Mama Jean” Bello, and so on Sunday, July 15, they traveled to Indio, a town near Palm Springs. There they found the charmingly eccentric old lady, surrounded by relics, photographs and mementos of her beloved “Baby Jean.” Her approval was immediately forthcoming, for she took one look at Marilyn and declared that she could swear her baby had come back from the dead.
To those who knew the continuing parallels in the lives of the two platinum blondes, Mama Jean would not have sounded far from the mark. In fact, an outline of Jean Harlow’s last months provides an eerie stencil for Marilyn’s:
On January 30, 1937, the newly re-elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt invited Jean to his Birthday Ball in Washington; in order to attend, she had to leave the filming of Personal Property, which caused a dustup in Hollywood—at least until Louis B. Mayer realized the enormous publicity value of her appearance.
That spring of 1937, Jean spoke with Carolyn Hoyt, an interviewer from Modern Screen: “I have achieved, of late, a degree of peace. I feel now at peace with myself and with my world. I have attained this by forcing myself to realize that all I can do is done in the best way I know—and that, as they say, is that.” The sentiments might have been uttered by Marilyn to Meryman.
Also during the spring of 1937, Jean’s recurring illnesses were blithely treated with only sedatives and narcotics by the notorious Dr. E. C. Fishbaugh, who prescribed the same, and with the same harmful effects, for Fay Wray’s alcoholic husband.
On June 7, 1937—twenty-five years to the day before Marilyn was fired from Something’s Got to Give—Jean Harlow died of kidney failure, her last film incomplete. She was twenty-six, a creature of Hollywood, loved by millions, at last recognized for her talents—yet in the end failed by her Hollywood colleagues.
After taking tea with Mrs. Bello, her guests returned to Los Angeles. The three agreed to meet again in August, and before that, Marilyn and Sidney decided to meet two weeks later, at four o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, August 5, to work on a treatment for The Jean Harlow Story.
Despite her almost daily injections, the difficulties of her sessions with Greenson and the uncertainties of the future, there was a fresh maturity in Marilyn Monroe that summer. And although she was dependent on certain chemicals, they seemed only fitfully to stymie her life—and this itself may be testimony to her fundamental strength, her resolve to overcome obstacles past and present. “Summarizing this time,” said Pat Newcomb, “I would say that yes, she was in control of things.”
Ralph Roberts heartily agreed. “She was really taking control of her life and asserting herself that summer,” he said, sentiments echoed by, among others, Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg. Roberts recalled that during the last months of her life, Marilyn was more optimistic than she had been in two years. She nurtured a close friendship with Wally Cox and renewed one with Wally’s special friend, Marlon Brando. “And she saw,” Roberts added, “that Greenson was severing all her close relationships, one by one. He had tried to cut me and the Strasbergs and Joe out of her life—and now Marilyn said he thought it would be better if she dismissed Pat Newcomb, too. By the end of July, Marilyn realized that if she was going to have any friends left, any life of her own at all, she might have to disconnect from Greenson.”
This decision would soon be firm, but first there was the matter of her relationship with Fox. By Wednesday, July 25, Hal Kanter had completed his revision of Something’s Got to Give and submitted it to Peter Levathes, Weinstein’s future being now as uncertain as that of Skouras and company.
Marilyn welcomed Levathes to her home on that same day, July 25. Before his arrival, Marilyn was awake early and, determined to look her best, greeted Agnes Flanagan (who washed and styled her hair) and Allan Snyder (who deftly applied a morning makeup). Cautious about a discussion without an agent or attorney present, Marilyn then asked Pat Newcomb to come over and stand unseen behind a bedroom door, to witness her meeting with Levathes.
In 1992, Levathes provided an account of that morning with Marilyn, and his recollection was later confirmed by Pat:
As so often with Marilyn’s history at Fox, we simply decided to reinstate her. I was the one responsible for firing her, so I wanted to be the one to personally rehire her. No one wanted bad blood. She told me she didn’t want her name tarnished, nor did she wish to ruin anyone. She did not seem unhappy or depressed at all, she asked if we could review the new script and we did. She read it and was very astute about it, thinking carefully before she made some excellent suggestions. Marilyn saw, for example, great comic potential for a scene she had in mind: “A woman who has been off on a desert island for years wouldn’t eat so delicately with knives and forks . . .” And she suggested another scene in which her character just forgot about shoes, because she was unused to wearing them. I remember saying, “Marilyn, these are beautiful ideas!” She was very happy and creative and glad to have a say in the revised script. She was in fine spirits and looking forward to getting back to work.
It seemed to Levathes that all the anguish, all the pain could have been avoided but for “her so-called advisers, who caused her a terrible identity crisis.” He told her that the lawsuits would be dropped, and that she was to be rehired at a higher salary; to whom, he asked, ought the new contract be sent? Marilyn hesitated, then said she would reply later that week. She seemed to him very pleasant and reasonable, and before he departed she said something that stayed with him over the years:
You know, Peter, in a way I’m a very unfortunate woman. All this nonsense about being a legend, all this glamour and publicity. Somehow I’m always a disappointment to people.
He never saw her again, for very soon his fortunes changed, if not as dramatically as hers.
When I said good-bye, she returned to the task she was engaged in when I arrived. There was an array of photos of her [by Bert Stern and George Barris], contact sheets and prints all over the floor, and she was making decisions about them. This was not, I thought, a shallow person, and I was sorry I never really knew her. She was a woman who made distinctions, who thought about her life, who knew the difference between sham and reality. She had depth. Of course she was enormously complex and I had a sense of some real underlying suffering there. But at her best there was no one like her. The wounds with Fox were healed, and when I last saw her, she was like a young and beautiful starlet, eager to do a picture that now had real possibilities.
Their hopes were unrealized, for soon there was another corporate earthquake at Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck was elected president of Twentieth Century–Fox, Levathes was booted out, and Milton Gould and John Loeb resigned from the board. Every decision made before Zanuck’s return was to be reevaluated, but after forty years in the business, even he (who never had a great appreciation of Marilyn’s talents) knew something about the box office. If anything had to give, he said, it would not be Marilyn Monroe. Zanuck personally attended the meetings on the recommencement of Something’s Got to Give.
For the last weekend of July, Marilyn had been invited to be the Lawfords’ guest at the new Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, where Frank Sinatra was going to sing. To this she had readily agreed, and (as Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan knew) she had telephoned Joe and asked him to meet her there. Although Robert Kennedy was due to arrive in Los Angeles that weekend and she had originally planned to hear an address he was to give, there were now more important matters on Marilyn’s agenda. Except for her appearance at Sinatra’s Saturday evening performance, she and Joe kept a low profile during the entire weekend. “She didn’t want to be seen about too much,” recalled Roberts, “because she was afraid of any discord between Joe and Frank.”
Marilyn did, however, want to meet briefly with Dean Martin, who was also at the Lodge that weekend—not only to express thanks for his support during the June crisis but also to discuss briefly a movie project that Arthur Jacobs wanted to produce for her and Dean, a comedy called I Love Louisa. Next week, Marilyn said, she was going to watch some of the films of director J. Lee Thompson, whom Arthur had suggested.
For years, there were scurrilous and unfounded rumors of Marilyn accidentally overdosing on barbiturates that weekend and requiring emergency revival; and rumors of Marilyn socializing with various figures from the criminal underworld with whom she became sexually involved (among them, Johnny Roselli, Bugsy Seigel and Sam Giancana). But the actor Alex D’Arcy, who knew Marilyn (since appearing with her in How To Marry a Millionaire) and was also a close friend of Roselli—a key mob figure in Los Angeles—hotly denied both insinuations: “There was absolutely never any affair between Marilyn and any of these men,” he said. “In fact there was no connection between Marilyn and the mob at all! She was in Lake Tahoe to be with Joe!” Betsy Duncan Hammes, who also knew Roselli and Sinatra well, agreed: “I was in Lake Tahoe that weekend, and I saw Marilyn eating dinner. Giancana and his crowd weren’t there, and I would have known if they were.”
On Sunday evening, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles with the Lawfords, and Joe headed for San Francisco, to appear in an exhibition game and to tell his family what he and Marilyn had decided that weekend. As Valmore Monette confirmed, Marilyn had finally agreed to remarry Joe. “He loved her a great deal and they had always been in contact,” according to Monette, “and he told me that he had decided to remarry her. He thought things would be different than they had been before and that everything would work out well for them now. I knew that was why he left us and was going back out there in 1962.”
Marilyn and Joe planned a wedding date of Wednesday, August 8, in Los Angeles, and a radiant Marilyn returned home with Joe’s pajamas. “She was fighting to take responsibility for her own life,” said Susan Strasberg, “and so she was getting out of relationships that were not good for her and back into one that was. She knew she needed some sort of emotional and spiritual anchor.” The same need could be said of Joe, who had become a kind of commercial Flying Dutchman, respected but lonely.
On Monday, July 30, Marilyn saw excerpts from Thompson’s films in Arthur Jacobs’s screening room and, on the spot, agreed to accept him as director for I Love Louisa early in 1963.4 Jacobs added that Jule Styne, who had given Marilyn “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, had agreed to write new songs for her. The same day, Marilyn tried to reach Milton Rudin, for she wished to make a new will; as attentive and supportive as he had been, however, Rudin felt that he could not sign a will and certify that she was of sound and disposing mind, for he believed her to have serious problems with both pills and paranoia. In a way, Rudin was correct, for Marilyn’s problems were far from solved, and she knew she had to face her dependence on drugs and on Greenson just as she had to continue a maturation that in many ways was just now beginning. But that she was of unsound mind is quite another assertion.5
Since her teens, Marilyn had long believed she had nothing else to offer but what Grace Goddard, photographers and studios claimed: the mass appeal of her beauty and her body. She also believed that “Marilyn Monroe,” although at least partly a false pretender, represented a part of her true self. She had indeed encouraged an image of sexual allure and availability, and the endorsement and acceptance of her in those terms were important.
But there was another aspect of her personality—or more accurately, a real identity behind the persona. Marilyn had often tried to repress and disguise the image with black wigs and dark glasses, without makeup. She tried to separate herself from “Marilyn Monroe” by reducing “her” to another, a third person—“her”—“Would you like to see me be her?” Unlike other screen stars, Marilyn never fused the two. Marlene Dietrich, for example, eventually believed the illusion created for her, and the fall that injured her body at the age of seventy-five also wounded something within. Believing her youth and illusory self were all she had, Dietrich had to withdraw from public view when the youth and glamour faded, and for the last sixteen years of her life she was virtually a recluse.
Marilyn, on the other hand, always reaching for an integration of her personality, knew in some way that her emotional health depended on a separation between the public Marilyn and the private self. Sorrow, confusion and neuroses prevented her rising above the image she deplored to become the woman she yearned to be. Her film roles continually forced her to rely on what she wanted to put behind her; no wonder, then, that most of all she longed to sleep. When she awoke, she was restrained, forced to assume “Marilyn Monroe” again, the conundrum of the sexually available, ever-popular teenage waif who somehow retained her innocence. That she recognized her popularity was caused by an image she hated—and that now, for the first time in 1962, was openly admitting—showed how clearly she realized the split in herself. This can hardly, however, be called “schizophrenic”; in fact it reveals a remarkable clarity of self-perception.
Had she not been a woman who (as Levathes said) “made distinctions, who thought about her life, who knew the difference between sham and reality,” there would have been no need for a struggle, no need for her to admit that she needed to grow, no anguished cries to get on with her life: “There’s a future and I can’t wait to get to it.”
When Marilyn left Fox in 1954, she had taken a bold step in abandoning the identification of herself with its false image; new friends, new work, studies—all these would, she hoped, enable her to transcend her own limitations. Only a courageous woman would so act.
But part of the problem was, then as in 1962, that part of her still depended on outer approval, still considered herself a child—only a body without a soul worth probing, and in this regard we are very close to sounding the reasons for her mass appeal decades later. She still believed the Gladys/Grace tales of family madness, and her refuge into an adopted false self was something she could not entirely abandon. Something in Marilyn still feared that she might forever slip back to being the patronized child-bride, the girl who would do best to forget her unknown lineage and assume the identity of America’s ultimate pin-up darling after World War II.
In a profound sense, she was still telling the culture about the Kinsey Report a decade later, for she was still the worrisome union of national needs: sex with innocence; worshipful gaze with the fear of experience; adolescent longing and adult responsibility; desire and, in its aftermath, too often disappointment when too much is demanded. What was endemic to a culture—from just after the war, when she entered movies (1947) to the beginning of a social revolution (1962)—was almost inextricable from Marilyn Monroe.
Kinsey spoke of sex, wrote about it, inquired into its most intimate details, and Hollywood was more and more parading the new sexual frankness. The boys he interviewed had been in the war and were entitled to be considered men. But the men seen on television and in the movies in the 1950s were mostly boys: Cary Grant in Monkey Business is nothing so much as a handsome preppie; the “romantic lead” of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes turns out to be a rich child; even in River of No Return, where the wild man to be tamed is no less than Robert Mitchum, a boy is necessary to link the couple.
Amid all this confusion, Marilyn Monroe and her aspirations had to be mocked by the culture. The thought of so independent a woman was anathema: the country wanted a child-woman—a busty, sexy gal, not too bright, whom distance made somewhat unreal, the stuff of dreams, someone who would not (and whom we could not allow to) grow up.
Just as harmful as the studios that reflected the culture and in ways more tragic, she had become unwittingly trapped in the pop-Freudian circle that urged her continually to consider her childhood—the worst possible agenda for the orphan’s unending absorption with self. But her parent surrogates—Strasberg, Miller, Kris, Greenson—suggested it, demanded it. And so to please them she underwent Freudian therapy. Instead of freeing her, it froze her. In the end, it was wondrous that she did not break down sooner, for each time she tried to go forward there were those whose advantage it was to keep her ever the subordinate child.
On the morning of Tuesday, July 31, Marilyn telephoned Jean Louis’s assistant, Elizabeth Courtney, who was to come over as soon as possible for the final fittings of a new gown Jean had designed for her. “She was so happy,” recalled Courtney—and with good reason, for this was to be her wedding dress. That afternoon, after a ninety-minute session with Greenson, Marilyn returned home and spent several hours on the telephone, placing calls to (among others) a florist, her local wine shop and a caterer.
“I want to be loved by a man, from his heart, as I would love him from mine,” she had said in an interview that June. “I’ve tried, but it hasn’t happened yet.” Now at last, the fulfillment of that longing seemed very close indeed.
1. Italics are the author’s. Considering the visit to Gurdin the previous day, Greenson’s allusion to Svengali sounds chilling.
2. All these calls were put through the main switchboard at the Department of Justice (REpublic 7-8200) and then transferred to the attorney general’s secretary. Her address book lists only this number; she never had access to Kennedy’s private line.
3. The notes of her regular surgeon, Leon Krohn, M.D. (chief of the gynecological service at Cedars), leave no doubt that the later rumors of an abortion are sheer fiction.
4. The film, starring Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum and (in the role designed for Marilyn) Shirley MacLaine, with songs by Jule Styne, was released in 1964 as What a Way to Go!
5. As for her will, the 1961 draft stood. At the time of her death, Marilyn left only the house, assessed at a value of $60,000; furniture, furnishings and personal effects valued at $3,200; $2,200 in bank accounts; and $405 cash on hand. The value of her Estate over the years grew as a result of the subsequent commercial marketing of her name and image.