Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Marilyn and her husband went rowing on the lake in Central Park. Disguised in Miller’s horn-rimmed glasses, she walked Hugo, the basset hound. Marilyn sang what was by now her party piece, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ at a Miller family gathering. She sat at the feet of Miller’s father, Isadore, and the old man pretended to be annoyed when she pampered him.

  Marilyn entered eagerly into the role of stepmother to Jane, Miller’s teenage daughter by his first marriage, and Robert, his nine-year-old son. Soon Marilyn would puzzle Hollywood visitors to the Manhattan apartment by abruptly vanishing during an important meeting. She would return to explain that she ‘had to get the kids off to school.’

  Years later she said of Miller’s children and DiMaggio’s son, ‘I take a lot of pride in them, because they’re from broken homes. I think I understand about them. I think I love them more than anyone. I wanted to be their friend. Only time could prove that to them and they had to give me time.’ Marilyn kept in touch with ‘her children’ long after the Miller marriage was over, and their pictures would be found in her room after her death.

  Marilyn, with the aid of a maid and a cook, achieved a degree of domesticity in the first year of the Miller marriage. She could still be two and a half hours late for her own dinner party, but Miller would explain with a grimace, ‘Ah, she’s still in the tub.’

  Actor Kevin McCarthy remembered Marilyn at the East 57th Street apartment, ‘in high heels, without stockings, wobbling about in a short black dress. She had gashes in her legs because she’d made a mess of shaving them. She had a strange manner — sweet, poignant, a little distrait.’

  Norman Rosten recalled happy champagne parties. ‘Marilyn loved to dance,’ he says, ‘and Miller too — with a few drinks — would attempt an eerie, loping fox-trot, perilously off-balance.’ Rosten, himself, dancing with Marilyn with more than a drink or two in him, promised to write a poem in praise of her breasts.

  Miller had said, ‘Life will go on the only way I know how to make it go — with a lot of work, a couple of laughs, and a lot of worry.’ The spring of 1957 had its worries.

  All was not joy when, in the first stage of the contempt-of-Congress case, Miller was found guilty. There was embarrassment when the ‘Wrong Door Raid’ inquiry brought national headlines, and the threat that Marilyn would have to testify. She begged off, claiming ‘a virus infection.’

  The collapse of Marilyn’s partnership with Milton Greene brought heartache and divided loyalties. A scandal magazine raked up a story about Marilyn’s infidelities to Joe DiMaggio in 1952, with Bob Slatzer. The article, complete with pictures of Marilyn and Slatzer together, had been leaked by Marilyn’s former Hollywood maid. Marilyn placed panicky calls to Slatzer, reporting that her new husband was very annoyed.

  These were mere irritations. ‘It’s no fun being married to an electric light,’ Joe DiMaggio had said. ‘Mr Miller seems to be faring better. But then he knows how to switch off.’

  Switching off, for Arthur Miller, had always meant escaping to the countryside. In the summer of 1957 he and Marilyn spent little time in Manhattan. Norman Rosten, invited to use the apartment in their absence, would find a scrawled note of welcome from Marilyn. One read:

  Dear Norman,

  There is a homemade strawberry short cake in the Fridge, Also milk — help yourself. Also, however long you need to be here —1 wk — 2wks etc. feel free to come and go as you please …

  You are not imposing. We’re glad you’re aboard — even if we go down — sinking — the more the merrier!

  I’m leaving you with this stanza (from an unchildlike childhood) —

  Here goes —

  Good nite

  Sleep

  and Sweet repose

  Where ever you lay your Head —

  I hope you find your nose —

  Marilyn

  In June 1957 the Millers climbed into a white Lincoln convertible and drove out of New York to the eastern tip of Long Island. Here, at Amagansett, they found their summer idyll. They rented a weatherbeaten wooden house, Stony Hill Farm, and dropped out of public view for several months. The locals saw Marilyn, dressed in tattered shorts and one of her husband’s shirts, shopping at the village store. Posterity can record that the couple ate a great deal of angel food cake and ice cream, and that Arthur Miller liked his steaks thick.

  Miller brought his typewriter to Amagansett, and wrote in the mornings. He was still unable to finish his next stage play, but he did complete some short stories. They included The Misfits, which was to grow into a screenplay for the last film Marilyn would ever make.

  At Amagansett, though, work took second place to wife. The couple were seen every day on the beach, walking or just quietly sitting. One photograph, taken by a friend, shows Marilyn clasping Miller adoringly around the waist as he fishes in the surf. Miller admitted to having gained twenty-five pounds since marrying Marilyn, and the picture shows it.

  There were some excursions to the city. Miller was persuaded to get into a tuxedo, his wife into a gown, for the New York premiere of The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn, mysteriously, had agreed to open a Sidewalk Superintendents’ Club at the site of the new Time and Life Building. Her husband declined to be dragged out for that one, and Marilyn agreed only if she could be whisked back and forth by helicopter. She arrived more than two hours late for a meeting with Laurance Rockefeller, and Rockefeller departed, grumbling that he had ‘never waited that long for anyone.’

  For Marilyn-watchers these excursions offered related clues. The premiere was in aid of a children’s charity, and Marilyn visited the Sidewalk Superintendents’ Club feeling ‘woozy in the stomach.’

  Marilyn was pregnant. In June, in an interview suppressed in her lifetime because the publicity people judged it out of tune with her image, she had said, ‘A man and a woman need something of their own. A baby makes a marriage perfect.’ Within weeks of her thirty-first birthday, and on the eve of her first wedding anniversary, she conceived.

  After all the talking about childbearing, Marilyn was delighted, awed, also confused. One evening, at a party on Long Island, Norman Rosten found her out on the porch alone, sobbing. Marilyn would keep a photograph of herself taken that month, and told a friend years later, ‘It was the happiest point of my entire life.’

  Miller was pleased too. ‘To understand Marilyn best,’ he was to say, ‘you have to see her around children. They love her; her whole approach to life has their kind of simplicity and directness.’ Not entirely in jest, for Miller was a handsome fellow, a wit among their friends had reversed Shaw’s famous reply to Isadora Duncan. ‘How wonderful it would be,’ he exclaimed, ‘if their first child had his looks and her brains!’

  The pregnancy did not last two months. On the first day of August, as Miller worked indoors at Amagansett, he heard Marilyn scream. She was in the garden, doubled up in pain. An ambulance rushed her to her own gynecologist at Doctors Hospital in New York City. His efforts were in vain, for this was a tubular pregnancy. Marilyn awoke from surgery to learn that the embryo had been surgically removed.

  Marilyn’s friend Jim Haspiel visited her at the hospital. She was lying in near darkness, Miller at her side, with classical music playing on a bedside radio. She told Haspiel that, according to the doctors, the child she had lost would have been a son. Marilyn was to die, five years later, on the anniversary of this miscarriage.

  At the time Marilyn seemed to rally well. She made a point of reviving an appointment for a champagne party that had been canceled on the day of the miscarriage. The doctors said she could yet bear a child, and Miller declared ‘she wants as many babies as she can have, and I feel the same way. She has more courage than anyone I’ve met.’

  Back at Amagansett, Marilyn rested and tried again. It was a sad ordeal. She would write to the Rostens:

  I think I’ve been pregnant for about three weeks or may be two. My breasts(s) have been too sore to even touch — I’ve never had that in my life before
also they ache —also I’ve been having cramps and slight staining since Monday — now the staining is increasing and pain is increasing by the minute. I did not eat all day yesterday — also last night I took 4 whole amutal sleeping pills — which was by actual count really 8 little amutal sleeping pills.

  Could I have killed it by taking all the amutal on an empty stomach? (except I took some sherry wine also)

  What shall I do? if it is still alive I want to keep it.

  Marilyn was not pregnant that month, nor would she be for many months to come. In the last days of the summer of 1957 the couple returned to the Manhattan apartment.

  A new personal maid hired that fall, Lena Pepitone, painted a picture of a disturbed Marilyn, unhealed by the quiet months in the sun. Her mistress, Pepitone said, lounged around in bed till all hours, and wandered around the apartment naked. She frequently called for a drink, usually vodka, as soon as she woke up. Miller seemed stoical, and kept mostly to himself. Fortunately for both of them, winter brought a new preoccupation: ‘Arthur’s farm.’

  Miller, who was and is addicted to the country life, had been prospecting for some time for a new home in Connecticut. He had sold the house he had shared with his first wife, and in 1957 he and Marilyn searched for a new estate. Bob Josephy, their friend who lived in the area, recalled Marilyn arriving ‘completely unequipped as far as clothing was concerned, tripping around a rough field in her high heels.’ Late in the year, largely with Marilyn’s funds, they bought a three-hundred-acre farm. It was near Miller’s old property, and not far from the colonial town of Roxbury.

  As Marilyn described it, the eighteenth-century farmhouse was ‘a kind of old saltbox with a kitchen extension.’ The couple ignored advice to tear it down and build anew, and started a refurbishing operation that Marilyn never considered really finished. Original beams and ceilings were left intact, and a studio was built for Miller’s use when writing. They also built a new wing, which Marilyn, in renewed hope, christened the Nursery. Miller said, ‘It’s the place where we hope to live until we die.’

  The Roxbury area of Connecticut was peopled by gentlemen farmers and families who built their country retreats generations ago. There were some show business folk — including Richard Widmark, who had co-starred with Marilyn in Don’t Bother to Knock — but no one pestered them here.

  Marilyn assimilated easily, as a somewhat exotic addition to an established country clique. The immediate neighbors, the Diebolds, took a shine to her after meeting at a cocktail party. They treated her like one of their children, not as a movie actress, and Marilyn seemed happy.

  To these American country squires, Marilyn seemed a Marie Antoinette figure playing at being a country girl. Here, more than ever, she could indulge her compulsive affection for all living things. Hugo, the basset hound, was admitted, rain-soaked and muddy, to the newly decorated living room. Marilyn adopted Cindy, a half-starved mongrel of uncertain breed who had stumbled into the backyard. She fixed a feeding station for birds in a maple tree, and worried about how birds eat during their migration. She acquired two talking parakeets, which henceforth made innumerable flights to and from Hollywood. Butch, her favorite, was smuggled aboard his first flight to New York, only to awaken en route, squawking his new chorus: ‘I’m Marilyn’s bird, Marilyn’s bird.’

  The concern for animals and nature was obsessive, and psychiatrists would make much of it. Inez Melson, Marilyn’s former business manager in California, was once wakened to take an urgent call from Connecticut. It was four o’clock in the morning on the East Coast, and Marilyn was calling to say that Butch, the parakeet, was frightened by a thunderstorm.

  Arthur Miller discovered how fraught life could be with a mate who became frantic about the death of any living thing. He based a short story, ‘Please Don’t Kill Anything,’ on what had happened the evening he and Marilyn watched fishermen hauling in their catch. Marilyn ran about throwing back the living rejects from the catch, worrying about their chances of survival.

  ‘She looked up,’ he wrote, ‘like a little girl, with that naked wonder in her face, even as she was smiling in the way of a grown woman, and she said, “But some of them might live now till they’re old … and see their children grow up!”’

  In New York, on a walk to the little park at East 58th Street, Marilyn once came upon two boys trapping pigeons. When they explained the birds would fetch fifty cents each at the market, she paid the boys to release their catch. For a long time after that, she returned to the park every week to pay the ransom.

  Another episode was truly pathetic. Once, arriving home at Roxbury, Marilyn noticed that the grass borders had been mown while she was out. The myriad nasturtiums that had covered the grass now lay in orange and yellow ruin. Marilyn, ‘crying as if she were wounded,’ made Miller stop the car. Then she rushed about picking up the fallen flowers, sticking the stalks back into the ground, to see if they might recover.

  Arthur Miller watched and listened, and worried. In Please Don’t Kill Anything he wrote that ‘while part of his heart worshipped her fierce tenderness toward all that lived, another part knew that she must come to understand that she did not die with the moths and the spiders and the fledgling birds.’

  At Amagansett, after the loss of the baby, there had been an evening when Miller noticed his wife slumped in the chair, breathing stertorously. He counted her sleeping pills, or rather the lack of them, and realized Marilyn was going into a barbiturate coma. Her life was saved only because of the prompt action of an emergency medical crew from a nearby clinic.

  One night at 3:00 A.M. in New York, Norman and Hedda Rosten were summoned urgently to the apartment on East 57th Street. There had been another overdose, and Marilyn’s stomach had been pumped. When he arrived Marilyn was weeping quietly in her bed. It had been close; her fingers were still blue. Rosten leaned over in the half-light, and asked, ‘How are you, dear?’

  ‘Alive. Bad luck,’ came the slurred reply. ‘Cruel, all of them, all those bastards. Oh, Jesus. …’

  At a party in Brooklyn Heights in 1958, Norman Rosten watched Marilyn sitting on a windowsill, glass in hand. She looked moody, ‘in her personal daydream, gripped by thoughts that could not be pleasant.’ Rosten walked to her and said, ‘Hey, psst, come back.’

  Marilyn talked of her sleepless nights, then pointed out the window. ‘It’s a quick way down from here. Who’d know the difference if I went?’

  ‘I would,’ said Rosten, ‘and all the people in this room who care. They’d hear the crash.’

  Marilyn laughed.

  Jokingly, yet not entirely so, Rosten got Marilyn to agree to a pact. If either came close to committing suicide, he or she would call the other, to be talked out of it. Rosten thought then that, one day, Marilyn would call. He still keeps a fragment of a poem she wrote in 1958. It reads:

  Help Help

  Help I feel life coming closer

  When all I want to do is to die.

  In New York that year, in the divided self behind the famous eyes, Marilyn had begun to die.

  24

  ‘THIS, THEN,’ MUSED BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER Cecil Beaton, is the wonder of the age — a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby, and a Minsky artist. Perhaps she was born the postwar day we had need of her. … Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old; but what will happen with the years, only time can tell.’

  Of the millions of words disgorged on Marilyn, Beaton’s three pages are among the most articulate and shrewd. He saw a creature ‘as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain, an incredible display of inspired, narcissistic moods.’ Marilyn’s performance, for Beaton, was ‘pure charade.’

  In 1958 Marilyn posed for photographer Richard Avedon for a brilliant series of still pictures portraying film stars of the past. Across the pages of Life magazine Marilyn became Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, and Marlene Dietrich. It was, as Arthur Miller commented, ‘a kind of history of our m
ass fantasy, so far as seductresses are concerned.’

  That year, as she performed fantasy to perfection, Marilyn really began her slide to defeat in the real world. The child was a woman of thirty-two, drinking real alcohol and too much of it, and she knew she was breaking apart. Marilyn now met one of her film idols — and a future co-star on The Misfits — Montgomery Clift. At their first encounter, a specially arranged dinner, both got drunk, he on Scotch and Marilyn on rum cocktails.

  Later, during an evening with Marilyn and her husband, Clift disintegrated as he regularly did, falling about, failing to complete his sentences. Marilyn commented, ‘He’s the only person I know who’s in worse shape than I am.’

  Marilyn had arrived back in Los Angeles in early July, to make Some Like It Hot. She had not filmed in Hollywood since Bus Stop, and the press turned out in force at the airport. At first there was confusion as to whether she had arrived at all. Then, thirty minutes after the last passenger had left the aircraft, Marilyn appeared.

  ‘An apparition in white materialized in the doorway,’ wrote the Los Angeles Times’ reporter, ‘white hair aswirl in the propwash of another plane; white silk shirt open at the powdered white throat; white, tight, silk skirt; white shoes; white gloves. Marilyn Monroe blinked big, sleepy eyes at the world … began descending — slowly and wickedly — down the steps. “I’m so sorry,” she cooed. “I was asleep.”’

  Reporters observed three books under Marilyn’s arm: The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, and To the Actor by Michael Chekhov. It was later reported that Marilyn’s suite at the Bel-Air Hotel was decorated largely in white, to duplicate the New York apartment, and that she had purchased another parakeet because she was lonely for her dog, left on the East Coast.

  Marilyn’s behavior during the shooting of Some Like It Hot outdid all previous delinquencies. Director Billy Wilder, who four years earlier had survived Seven Year Itch with Marilyn, now began a five-month ordeal. Marilyn appeared for a lunchtime call at six in the evening. One day, while sitting in her dressing room reading Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, she responded to an assistant director’s call with ‘Go fuck yourself.’