Chapter Twenty-Four
THE BODY DESIRED BY MILLIONS belonged to no one: on Monday morning, August 6, Marilyn Monroe’s remains still lay unclaimed at the Los Angeles County morgue. And so, to no one’s surprise, Joe DiMaggio stepped in to adjudicate the last details. Late that afternoon, she was brought back to the Westwood Village Mortuary on Glendon Avenue, a few steps from busy Wilshire Boulevard.
Ten years earlier, at the start of her great dash to stardom, Marilyn had asked her friend Allan Snyder to come to a hospital just before she was to be discharged: she wanted to look her best for the public and the cameras. For fifteen years, no one understood her fears and her features better than he, no one was more patient and loyal in devoting his craft to her benefit.
“Promise me something, Whitey,” she had said, using his familiar nickname, while he brushed and lined, highlighting here and toning there.
“Anything, Marilyn.”
“Promise me that if something happens to me—please, nobody must touch my face but you. Promise you’ll do my makeup, so I’ll look my best when I leave.”
“Sure,” he said, teasing. “Bring the body back while it’s still warm and I’ll do it!”
A few weeks later, Allan received a gift box from Tiffany’s. Wrapped in a light blue pouch was a gold money clip with an engraving:
Whitey Dear
While I’m still warm
Marilyn
Now it was time to call in the promise. On Tuesday, August 7, the telephone rang at Snyder’s Malibu home.
“Whitey?” Joe was calling from his hotel room in Santa Monica. “Whitey, you promised—will you do it, please—for her?”
No explanation was necessary. They both remembered.
“I’ll be there, Joe.”
And so Allan drove to the mortuary. Swiftly, deftly, reverently, he took up his bases and brushes, his liquids and rouges, and worked there in the cool room. He had done this job so many times, had worked on her while she laughed and chatted or simply slept; he had prepared Marilyn for so many public appearances before she exited from dressing rooms, airplanes and clinics. Now, as Allan completed his task, Joe entered.
On Wednesday morning, August 8, Allan returned early, knowing that the makeup would surely need retouching.
Joe was still there. He had spent the night with his beloved, his fingers clasped tightly, his gaze fixed on Marilyn’s features: it was the solitary vigil of an adoring knight, worshipful from twilight to dawn on the eve of a great battle. Now Joe sat motionless, leaning forward as if by sheer force of love and longing he could urge her back to life for their wedding. To strangers, reporters and writers, he never uttered her name again, nor did he ever remarry.
Joe made a hard decision during those three days. There would be no Hollywood stars or directors at the funeral, no producers or studio executives, no newsmen, reporters or photographers: they had only hurt Marilyn, he said. Instead, only thirty relatives and friends were to be admitted, among them Berniece, who had come from Florida out of respect for the half-sister she scarcely knew but had come to admire from afar; Enid Knebelkamp, Grace’s sister; the Snyders; Lee and Paula Strasberg; May Reis; Ralph Roberts; and the Greenson family, with Eunice Murray. Jim Dougherty, remarried, was at his job with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Arthur Miller, also remarried, likewise declined to attend.
Gladys, still at Rockhaven, never knew of her daughter’s death. She was released from the sanitarium several years later and, after living for a time with Berniece, entered a Florida nursing home where she died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1984, at eighty-two. When questioned, Gladys seemed not quite certain who Norma Jeane was or who she had become.
The service began in the mortuary chapel at one o’clock, when an organist offered a selection from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and one of Marilyn’s favorite melodies, “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. A local minister preached, taking his text from the Book of Amos: “How wonderfully she was made by her Creator.” Then, as Joe had requested, Lee Strasberg spoke briefly: “We knew her,” he said, his voice shaking and his eyes glazed with tears, “as a warm human being, impulsive, shy and lonely, sensitive and in fear of rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment. The dream of her talent was not a mirage.”
Before the casket was closed, Joe bent over, weeping openly as he kissed Marilyn. “I love you, my darling—I love you,” he said, placing a nosegay of pink roses in her hands. Henceforward for twenty years, flowers would be delivered weekly from Joe to her burial place—just as he had promised Marilyn when she told him of William Powell’s pledge to the dying Jean Harlow. Joe then led the group from the chapel to the crypt, a hundred yards away. They passed the grave markers of Ana Lower, buried here in 1948, and of her niece Grace McKee Goddard, who had followed five years later.
That day they were gathered at the center of the neighborhood where Marilyn had spent almost all her life. It was the same small arena where she had grown and gone out to work in such a brief but brilliant radiance, this local girl who now belonged to the world. There were Hawthorne and the old Bolender house to the south; the Los Angeles Orphans Home eastward in Hollywood, near the place where Gladys and Grace worked at film-cutting benches and took the girl to the movies; and very close, Nebraska Avenue, where she lived with Aunt Ana, and Emerson Junior High School, where Norma Jeane was “the Mmmmm Girl,” dating the wise-cracking Chuck Moran. Near them, too, were University High; the house where she married Jim; the soundstages of Twentieth Century—Fox; and Fifth Helena Drive.
They stood silently while the coffin was placed in a marble wall-crypt to which a bronze plaque was attached:
MARILYN MONROE
1926–1962
After the mourners had departed, reporters, newsreel photographers and the public were at last permitted to approach. In the cemetery garden, cameras clicked and movie film whirred all afternoon and through the quiet evening.
