Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Let’s Make Love was not all gloom and dissension, and Marilyn’s sense of humor had not deserted her. She was told the censor would object to a kissing scene if it was performed lying down, on the grounds that she and Montand would appear to be actually making love. ‘Well,’ Marilyn responded, ‘we could equally well do that standing up!’

  Sometime that spring, for all their professional differences, Marilyn and the Frenchman began an affair. According to a close friend of the Millers who prefers not to be named, Marilyn had for some time ceased to be wholly faithful. ‘She had this terrible neediness,’ said the friend, ‘she went with other men simply for something to hold on to, however short-lived.’ One such brief infidelity had been with Nico Minardos, her lover of nearly a decade earlier. Now Marilyn turned to Yves Montand.

  Marilyn had earmarked Montand long ago, when she and roommate Shelley Winters compiled lists of longed-for lovers. Now she began telling friends, including her psychiatrist, that the Frenchman looked like Joe DiMaggio, that he excited her physically. On the set, it was obvious that they enjoyed playing at being in love. Not for the first time for a pair of screen lovers, the borderline between theater and reality became blurred.

  Simone Signoret sensed danger, but had to leave to honor a contract in Europe. Arthur Miller was in and out of Los Angeles and, immediate peril aside, seemed increasingly resigned to the collapse of his marriage. Marilyn and Montand were now frequently alone in their adjoining bungalows.

  One reporter, drawing on a later interview with Montand, said Marilyn, nude under her mink — an old Marilyn game — simply knocked on the Frenchman’s door one night and took him by storm.

  Arthur Miller, by another account, once surprised the couple in bed together when he returned to the bungalow to fetch his pipe. Soon a room-service waiter was blabbing bedroom stories to a journalist patron. The affair, or the heavy hint of it, became public knowledge.

  That summer, when filming finished, Montand flew back to Paris via New York. Marilyn, already on the East Coast, planned an elaborate interception. She reserved a room at a hotel, and turned up at the airport laden with champagne. The short stopover turned into a five-hour delay, and Marilyn and Montand were observed huddled together in the back of her limousine. The Frenchman, vastly embarrassed, then departed for Paris — and a reunion with the long-suffering Simone Signoret.

  More than a month later Marilyn, now working on The Misfits in Nevada, brought production to a halt with another of her breakdowns, and was flown to Los Angeles for detoxification. She was there when Montand made a brief return visit to California. Marilyn bombarded the Frenchman with telephone calls from her hospital bed, but he now refused to speak to her.

  Montand told columnist Hedda Hopper, who was with him when Marilyn called, ‘I think she is an enchanting child, and I would like to see her to say good-bye, but I won’t talk to her on the telephone; somebody might be listening. I’ve never met anyone quite like Marilyn Monroe, but she is still a child. I’m sorry, but nothing will break up my marriage.’

  In the midst of denying there had been an affair, Montand was evidently a very confused man. ‘The trouble was,’ he told Art Buchwald, ‘that Marilyn and I were a big contact together. …’ He told another reporter, ‘If I were not married, and if Marilyn were not married, I would not object to marrying her.’

  Marilyn, for her part, would not let go. For months to come, as her own marriage finally crumbled, she would fall back pathetically on the hope of luring Montand to her side. But they did not meet again.

  Simone Signoret, although deeply upset, handled the matter impeccably. ‘If Marilyn is in love with my husband,’ she said in a rare comment, ‘it proves she has good taste. For I am in love with him too.’

  In a poignant passage of her biography, Montand’s wife said of Marilyn: ‘She never knew to what degree I never detested her, and how thoroughly I had understood. … She’s gone without ever knowing that I never stopped wearing the champagne-colored silk scarf she’d lent me one day. It’s a bit frayed now, but if I fold it carefully, the fray doesn’t show.’

  26

  DURING ONE OF MARILYN’S ‘collapses’ while making Let’s Make Love, a new doctor began attending her in Bungalow 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Dr Ralph Greenson, a prominent California psychiatrist, had been asked by Marilyn’s New York analyst to look after the actress while she was in California.

  So began a most unusual relationship between doctor and patient. Ralph Greenson, with his wife and children, would in the end find themselves acting as yet another surrogate family for Marilyn. Two years later, Greenson would be one of the last people to speak to Marilyn alive, the first known to have seen her in death.

  Marilyn’s new psychiatrist was internationally respected. Of Russian extraction, trained in Vienna and Switzerland, he brought to his practice a firm grounding in the teachings of Freud. He was, indeed, close to Sigmund Freud’s family and associates. During the war Greenson had been chief of the Combat Fatigue Section of the Army Air Corps. He was the author of dozens of learned publications, and by 1960 had long been Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. In the words of a colleague, the doctor was ‘the backbone of psychoanalysis in the western United States.’

  Greenson was no stranger to Hollywood; he had had numerous show business clients, among them Frank Sinatra. The psychiatrist was forty-nine when he first met Marilyn, an intense, slender man, known for his sensitivity and deep personal concern for his patients.

  Quite properly, Dr Greenson generally refrained from discussing his most famous client. After her death however, he did give long briefings to psychiatrists of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, which had been asked to look into the case by the Coroner. Greenson, now long dead, also gave guarded interviews to two writers, who kept their notes.

  This author also discovered a source who had preserved a good deal of the doctor’s professional correspondence on Marilyn, dating from their first encounter. The material throws a stark new light on the gravity of Marilyn’s condition two years before her death.

  Marilyn’s first visit to Dr Greenson was after a day’s work on the set of Let’s Make Love. He noticed at once that she seemed heavily sedated, slurred her words, and had poor reactions. She seemed remote, failed to understand simple conversational sallies, and rambled on incoherently. She wanted to go straight on to the couch for a session of Freudian therapy. Greenson, alarmed by her condition, decided instead on ‘supportive therapy’ rather than deep psychoanalysis. He explored first the facts of her day-to-day life.

  Marilyn poured out a string of complaints. She said she disliked her part in the film, although she had earlier declared Let’s Make Love the best screenplay she had ever read. She now said her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, was of little use, because she paid too much attention to her own daughter, Susan. Psychiatrist Greenson found himself taking the role of ‘supportive acting coach.’

  Marilyn told of her chronic insomnia, and used that to justify a use of drugs that Greenson considered hugely excessive. The new patient moaned about her medical doctors, revealing in the process that she was flitting from doctor to doctor to obtain the drugs she wanted. As Greenson discovered, Marilyn would play one doctor off against another, secretly calling one behind another’s back. She amazed Greenson with her knowledge of drugs, and appalled him with the dangerous jumble of medicines she had been able to obtain.

  Greenson discovered that Marilyn was accustomed to taking Demerol, a narcotic analgesic similar to morphine. She also used the barbiturate phenobarbital HMC; sodium pentothol, a depressant of the nervous system, primarily used in anesthesia; and Amytal, another barbiturate. She habitually took several of these drugs intravenously.

  Privately, an angry Greenson railed against the ‘stupid doctors’ who had caved in to Marilyn’s past blandishments. He tried to make sure she henceforth used only one medical doctor, insisted on an end to drugs by injection, and especially
objected to further use of Demerol, which can be highly dangerous if abused.

  From doctors who had attended Marilyn, Greenson concluded that ‘although she resembled an addict, she did not seem to be the usual addict.’ She seemed able to give up her drugs on occasion, without withdrawal symptoms. Both doctors, however, feared she was on the way to becoming an addict.

  As Greenson strove to wean Marilyn from drugs, he tried to teach her the art of sleeping. It was an uphill struggle. One day, called to her hotel room, he found Marilyn ‘begging for intravenous sodium pentothol or Amytal — this despite some fourteen hours of sleep the day immediately preceding.’

  ‘I told her,’ the doctor wrote, ‘that she’d already received so much medication that it would put five other people to sleep, but the reason she wasn’t sleeping was because she was afraid of sleeping. I promised she would sleep with less medication if she would recognize she is fighting sleep as well as searching for some oblivion which is not sleep.’

  Dr Greenson also listened to Marilyn’s ‘venomous resentment’ toward Arthur Miller. She claimed her husband was ‘cold and unresponsive’ to her problems, attracted to other women, and dominated by his mother. She accused Miller of neglecting his father and not being ‘nice’ to his children. She said Miller would tell Greenson a different story, but not to believe him.

  Greenson did meet Miller, and found him ‘very interested in helping his wife and sincerely concerned about her, but from time to time gets angry and rejecting.’ The psychiatrist felt Miller had ‘the attitude of a father who had done more than most fathers would do, and is rapidly coming to the end of his rope.’ He advised Miller that what Marilyn needed was love and devotion without conditions. Anything less was unbearable to her.

  Much later, after Marilyn’s death, Greenson told colleagues that he thought the Miller marriage had collapsed ‘to a considerable degree’ on sexual grounds. Marilyn, he observed, felt that she was frigid. She ‘found it difficult to sustain a series of orgasms with the same individual.’

  Greenson would also report that, pathetically, this sexually dissatisfied woman ‘gloried and revelled in her personal appearance, feeling that she was an extremely beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. She always took great pains to be attractive and to give a very good appearance when she was out in public, although when she was at home and nobody could see her she might not be able to put herself together very well. She felt at times that she was unimportant and insignificant. The main mechanism she used to bring some feeling of stability and significance to her life was the attractiveness of her body.’

  In 1960, as Greenson first listened to Marilyn’s complaints about other people, he wrote, ‘As she becomes more anxious, she begins to act like an orphan, a waif, and she masochistically provokes them to mistreat her and to take advantage of her. As fragments of her past history came out, she began to talk more and more about the traumatic experiences of an orphan child.’ Dr Greenson perceived that the thirty-four-year-old woman still fed on the idea of herself as a ‘fragile waif.’

  Over the months, though he never voiced a firm diagnosis, Dr Greenson would move from noting symptoms of paranoia and ‘depressive reaction’ to observing signs of schizophrenia. He knew, above all, that he was dealing with a psyche so fragile that it could crumble into crisis at any time.

  For the time being, in 1960, Greenson hoped mainly to bring a deteriorating situation under control, not least by enforcing a drastic cut in Marilyn’s use of drugs. He told her flatly he ‘would not help her kill herself, or spite her husband, or rush into oblivion. …’ It was a fine strategy, but a vain hope.

  ‘The most serious complication of a major depressive episode,’ says the Manual of Mental Disorders, the book used by psychiatrists in the United States for formal diagnosis, ‘is suicide.’

  A final fling. Mexican screenwriter Jose Bolaños with a drunken Marilyn in 1962.

  A brief affair. With Marlon Brando, 1955.

  Table companions. With another Hollywood personality, Ronald Reagan, in 1953.

  The man who lasted longest. With playwright Arthur Miller in 1959. Their marriage survived more than four years.

  The French lover. The 1960 affair with Yves Montand coincided with the collapse of the Miller marriage but did not cause it. Marilyn’s mental health was deteriorating rapidly.

  A mistress of The Method. Paula Strasberg [left], eccentric wife of the Actors Studio founder, was Marilyn’s acting coach from 1956 on. Arthur Miller, seated [right], during the shooting of Some Like It Hot, had his doubts about the Strasbergs’ influence.

  Actress at work. On the set of The Seven Year Itch, 1954.

  27

  THREE YEARS EARLIER IN New York, as his wife lay recovering from one of her miscarriages, Arthur Miller had stepped out for a stroll in the little park in front of Doctors Hospital. He told a companion, photographer Sam Shaw, of a short story he had written, called The Misfits.

  The idea had come to Miller before marrying Marilyn — when he was living in a cabin in Nevada establishing residence for a divorce. There, at the Stix Ranch in Quail Canyon, Miller had met three cowboys who made their living hunting wild horses. They were wanderers, determinedly living their lives outside the conventional structure of American society, and they struck Miller as the last of a vanishing type of American. The horses they caught, which would be sold as dog food for six cents a pound, were also rarities, the harried survivors of a decimated breed. A story of the wilds could hardly be a play, Miller’s usual medium, so he wrote it as a rather long short story for Esquire magazine.

  Then, in the park outside Doctors Hospital, it occurred to Miller that he could expand ‘The Misfits’ into a screenplay, and it was, as a close friend put it, a valentine for Marilyn.

  Miller’s relationship with Marilyn had changed a great deal by July 1960, when a unique gathering of talent assembled at the Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, to make what the producer described to Time magazine as ‘an attempt at the ultimate motion picture.’ It was to star Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, and a number of noted actors playing minor roles just for the privilege of taking part. The director was to be John Huston, lured back to make a film on American soil for the first time in years.

  Marilyn was to play Roslyn, a lonely, troubled woman from the East, who comes to Reno seeking a divorce. She falls in love with Gay, an older man and rugged individualist, portrayed by Clark Gable, who teams up with two other fellows to round up horses.

  Roslyn, like Marilyn in real life, schemes and struggles to prevent the slaughter of the animals. Her fight for the horses becomes an epic struggle between man and woman, and from that — we are permitted to hope — love may survive.

  Arthur Miller arrived in Nevada before Marilyn. He knew the marriage was disintegrating, and he was aware, though perhaps not fully, of his wife’s treachery with Yves Montand. A few months earlier, when Miller was in Europe working on the Misfits script with John Huston, Huston had told a story about a couple who separated after each told the other of their infidelities. Miller had nodded and replied, ‘Truth destroyed them.’

  Brad Dexter, the actor whom Marilyn had asked to intervene when the DiMaggio marriage was crumbling, now found himself playing marriage counselor again. Marilyn said of Miller, ‘He’s accusing me of going to bed with every guy I ever met. It’s terrible. Would you talk to him?’ Dexter dined with Miller at La Scala restaurant in Beverly Hills, but got nowhere.

  The Montand affair did not destroy Miller’s marriage to Marilyn. It seems to have been at this time, though, that Miller ceased the endless effort to rescue his wife from her own turmoil. It was time to think of self-preservation.

  On the set of The Misfits, shooting still photographs in company with Henri Cartier-Bresson, was a distinguished female photographer, Inge Morath. Miller would eventually find in her his third wife, and a happy marriage that has lasted. The last painful act of marriage to Marilyn was to be pl
ayed out during the making of The Misfits.

  In New York, in the third week of July, Jim Haspiel went to the airport to see Marilyn off to the West Coast. He saw at once that she looked ravaged and unkempt, with ‘bags under the eyes and a period stain across the back of her skirt. I didn’t want to see her like that, and I turned away.’

  When Marilyn arrived three days later at Reno, Nevada, she kept everyone waiting — as usual — while she changed in the lavatory of the aircraft. Among those waiting was the wife of the governor of Nevada, who had been sent by her husband to welcome Marilyn with a bouquet.

  Next day, as the desert heat crept up to over 100 degrees, Marilyn began filming. On the set, she could still look wonderful. Photographer Cartier-Bresson saw in her beauty and intelligence combining to make ‘a certain myth of what we call in France la femme éternelle.’

  Alice McIntyre of Esquire thought her ‘like nothing human you have ever seen or dreamed. She is astonishingly white, so radically pale that in her presence you can look at others about as easily as you explore the darkness around the moon. Indeed, there seems the awful possibility in the various phases of her person that MM is a manifestation of the White Goddess herself: disdaining all lingerie and dressed in tight, white silk emblazoned with countless red cherries, she becomes at once the symbol of impartial and eternal availability, who yet remains forever pure — and a potentially terrible goddess whose instinct could also deal death and whose smile, when she directs it clearly at you, is exquisitely, heart-breakingly sweet.’

  The White Goddess exulted that she was working with the King. Clark Gable was the idol who so resembled the picture her mother had once told her was a photograph of her father. He was the man who, in occasional fantasies, she had sometimes suggested really was her father.