Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  ‘All these years,’ she told an interviewer, ‘and now, Rhett Butler! Doesn’t he look marvelous? We were rehearsing a very long scene, and he started to tremble, just the slightest bit. I can’t tell you how endearing that was to me. To find somebody — my idol — to be, well, human.’

  Clark Gable himself, the quintessential professional, realized Marilyn’s worth as an actress. He would live long enough to tell his agent, George Chasin, that working with Marilyn on The Misfits resulted in one of the very best of his seventy films. It was also Gable’s turn to ask, ‘What the hell is that girl’s problem? Goddamn it, I like her, but she’s so damn unprofessional. I damn near went nuts up there in Reno waiting for her to show.’

  Soon the question each morning on the set of The Misfits was, ‘Is Marilyn working today?’ Away from the controlling influence of Dr Greenson, she was drowning once more in drink and pills. At one point John Huston reckoned she took up to twenty Nembutal sleeping pills a day, swilled down with vodka or champagne. Often, in the coma of the morning, her old friend Whitey Snyder made her up while she was still lying flat in bed.

  ‘Marilyn would come to the set,’ Huston recalled, ‘and she’d be in her dressing room, and sometimes we’d wait the whole morning. Occasionally she’d be practically non compos mentis. I remember saying to Miller, “If she goes on at the rate she’s going she’ll be in an institution in two or three years, or dead. Anyone who allows her to take narcotics ought to be shot.” It was in the way of being an indictment against Miller, and then I discovered that he had no power whatever over her.’

  On John Huston’s birthday, August 5, Marilyn and Miller had a violent row in front of the Misfits company. It was even mentioned in the newspapers.

  The immediate cause of the conflict was almost certainly guilt. Marilyn had been making weekend dashes to Los Angeles to see — or try to see — Yves Montand, now returned from Europe. Back on the set, she spread a false rumor that Miller was having an affair with John Huston’s script assistant, Angela Allen. Her motive, Allen has come to think, was to ‘work out her own guilt over Montand. She could never allow herself to feel guilty, so attack became her means of defense.’

  As Miller slaved away on the script, which required constant rewriting, Marilyn distanced herself from him in a physical way. One night she arrived in the makeup man’s room and announced her intention of sleeping there to avoid being with Miller. It was Miller who resolved the problem by lugging his typewriter off to another room. Paula Strasberg moved in with Marilyn.

  ‘I found myself on Miller’s side,’ John Huston said. ‘He had done everything in the world to make that marriage survive. During the picture she embarrassed him in front of people. One time she left him on the set, by which I mean in the middle of the fucking desert. We were riding away and I saw Miller standing there. There were no other cars, and she hadn’t let him in her car. It was sheer malice, vindictiveness. It was shameful.’

  Two weeks later a monstrous cloud of black smoke masked the sun over Reno, as forest fires raged across the sierras. Electric power failed, and the only lights that night shone out from the major casinos, the hospital, and one window on the ninth floor of the Mapes Hotel, where Arthur Miller toiled over the script, his desk lit by The Misfits company generator.

  As Miller worked, Marilyn stood in the darkness with Rupert Allan, her press aide and friend, gazing out over the Truckee River. Allan told her about the life cycle of fish, how salmon go upriver to spawn, and how many thousands then die — or, as Allan put it, ‘just give up the struggle, to be eaten by other fish or by the raccoons.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ said Marilyn. ‘I can understand the salmon. I’ve felt like them.’

  Marilyn told Allan of yet another occasion when she had considered suicide. In New York, she said, she had climbed out on to the ledge of her thirteenth-floor apartment in her nightgown, determined to jump. ‘I saw a woman in a brown tweed suit,’ said Marilyn, ‘and I thought if I jumped I would do her in too. I waited out there for about five or ten minutes, but she didn’t move and I got so cold, so I climbed back in. But I would’ve done it.’

  Allan felt Marilyn was serious. He said he too had sometimes considered killing himself, and — like Norman Rosten before him — he suggested they made a pact. ‘If you ever think of suicide again, and if I ever do,’ he said, ‘the one of us will call the other.’ They agreed that if ever they had to make such a call, but had to leave a message, their code word would be ‘Truckee River.’

  Making suicide pacts, for Marilyn, was becoming a habit. After those with Norman Rosten and Rupert Allan, there would be one with Lee Strasberg, her acting teacher. Strasberg would recall that sometime in the next two years, ‘I extracted a promise from her that if she got in that sort of mood she would call me first. …’

  On August 26, 1960, seated with Marilyn in a station wagon, Gable had a speech that went: ‘Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dyin’s as natural as livin’; man who’s afraid to die is too afraid to live, far as I’ve ever seen. So there’s nothing to do but forget it, that’s all. Seems to me.’

  The next day, amid reports that she had been saved from death only after having her stomach pumped, Marilyn was evacuated to Los Angeles. In the broiling heat, she was carried to a plane wrapped in a wet sheet. Behind her at the airport, as the rest of the company dispersed, girls waved placards reading ‘Come Back Soon, Marilyn’ and ‘The Misfits Need You.’

  Marilyn languished in Westside Hospital for ten days, under the care of psychiatrist Ralph Greenson and an internist, Dr Hyman Engelberg. It was now that she tried desperately, and without success, to reach Yves Montand on the telephone. She did receive solicitous calls from her friend, Marlon Brando, and from Frank Sinatra.

  By the time Marilyn returned to work, an air of unreality and restrained hysteria had taken over the company of The Misfits. During Marilyn’s hospital stay, Louella Parsons had published a column saying flatly that Marilyn was ‘a very sick girl, much sicker than at first believed,’ and that she was under psychiatric care. The condition of the star on whom The Misfits depended was now public knowledge, and her colleagues persevered in a mood of fond hope fortified by black humor.

  Once, at 4:30 A.M., a New York wire service telephoned to check a report that Marilyn had committed suicide. ‘Why, that’s impossible!’ responded a Misfits press officer. ‘She has to be on the set at seven-thirty! Besides, Paula Strasberg would never stand for it.’

  In an early scene of The Misfits, Marilyn, as the woman in the throes of getting a divorce, is advised to toss her ring into the Truckee River. Local folklore, she learns, says this will keep her safe from divorce for the rest of her days. The scene left Marilyn morose, for her own next divorce was closer than anyone knew. During her stay in the hospital she had begged reporter Earl Wilson not to publish details of her drug-taking. There would soon be a bigger story, she said, about herself and Arthur Miller.

  At the end of September, W. J. Weatherby, feature writer for England’s Manchester Guardian, arrived on the set of The Misfits. His first impression ‘was that it was like standing in a minefield among all those manic-depressive people.’

  The reporter interviewed both Marilyn and Miller and found Miller protective and concerned about his wife. Perhaps, thought Weatherby, the rumors of a breakup were wrong? Then, on October 10, after he and Miller had watched one of the Kennedy-Nixon debates on television, Marilyn came banging into the room. ‘Thank goodness, you’ve brought someone home,’ she said coldly to Miller. ‘You never bring any company. It’s so dull.’ She then vanished into the bedroom.

  ‘Miller,’ Weatherby noticed, ‘looked as if he’d been struck.’

  A week later the company celebrated Arthur Miller’s forty-fifth birthday with a dinner at the Christmas Tree Inn. It was a rowdy affair, for the next day would see the end of the location shooting. Marilyn, for once, deigned to attend. In the midst of the merriment the unit’s resident jester, cameram
an Russell Metty, clambered to his feet. He aimed a few barbs at the famous males in the company, then turned to Marilyn. ‘Marilyn, please do us a favor,’ Metty said. ‘Stand up and say Happy Birthday to Arthur.’ There was a silence, in which Marilyn shook her head.

  The dinner broke up quickly, and Marilyn joined John Huston at one of the crap tables. She knew nothing about gambling, and asked Huston, ‘What should I ask the dice for, John?’

  ‘Don’t think, honey, just throw,’ Huston told her. ‘That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.’

  Huston recalled that ‘She had a lucky roll, but she didn’t know what to do with it.’

  When the shooting of The Misfits was finally over, Marilyn and Miller returned to New York on separate flights. On November 11 — Armistice Day, 1960 — Marilyn kept her promise to give Earl Wilson an exclusive. ‘The marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller is over,’ Wilson wrote in his story, ‘and there will soon be a friendly divorce.’

  Marilyn, once again besieged by newsmen, emerged pale and tearful to confirm the truth of the story. In the melee, one reporter shoved his microphone right into her mouth, chipping a tooth.

  Less than a week later, at four o’clock in the morning, Marilyn was wakened to the news that Clark Gable had died of a heart attack. Speaking on a house phone to a journalist in the lobby, Marilyn sobbed, ‘Oh, God, what a tragedy! Knowing him and working with him was a great personal joy. I send all my love and my deepest sympathy to his wife, Kay.’

  Kay Gable, then pregnant with the child her husband would never see, held equivocal feelings for Marilyn. She had privately suspected Marilyn of pursuing her husband. She certainly felt, Mrs Gable told her friend Kendis Rochlen, that ‘the strain of working with Marilyn had contributed to Clark’s death.’ The following year, however, Marilyn was invited to the christening party, where she held the Gables’ newborn son so long and so fervently that other guests felt uncomfortable.

  Marilyn did indeed feel guilty about Gable’s death. Admitting she had treated him shabbily during the making of The Misfits, she asked Sidney Skolsky, ‘Was I punishing my father? Getting even for all the years he’s kept me waiting?’

  She was, Skolsky recalled, ‘in a dark pit of despair.’

  John Huston and Arthur Miller had worked doggedly to complete The Misfits, yet the film was not received as ‘the ultimate motion picture.’ Few reviewers thought the movie worked, though many praised the acting by Gable and Marilyn.

  Accurately, John Huston was to reflect that Marilyn had not been acting at all, in the usual sense of the word. ‘She went right down into her own personal experience for everything, reached down and pulled something out of herself that was unique and extraordinary. She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn. But it was Marilyn, plus. She found things, found things about womankind in herself.’

  Arthur Miller said years later, ‘In The Misfits, her performance as a dramatic actress was extraordinary, but I’m not sure if all that torture was worth the result, all that agony. It’s not worth anything.’

  At the time, a week after the divorce announcement, Miller had sat in a viewing room, stunned. ‘I still don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘We got through it. I made a present of this to her, and I left it without her.’

  When The Misfits company disbanded, Marilyn sat on a desk drinking straight bourbon, and said, ‘Mostly I am thinking ahead, hoping I will give a better performance next time.’ Then she sighed. ‘I am trying to find myself as a person. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself I am an actress.’

  For Marilyn the actress, the hope would not be realized. She would never complete another film. As a person, Marilyn was flailing around for solace. Weeks earlier, at her lowest ebb during the filming, she had renewed contact with her friend Robert Slatzer. She gave him a photograph inscribed:

  To Bob, with many unforgettable memories of Reno — and other places — from one ‘Misfit’ to another,

  All my love,

  Always

  Marilyn

  September 8, 1960

  In November, from New York, Marilyn called Nico Minardos, another old lover. He was in Greece, filming with Jayne Mansfield, and Marilyn seemed pathetically concerned to know whether he and Mansfield were having an affair. Marilyn also tried to reach Milton Greene but, for reasons he cannot now recall, he didn’t call back. Above all, though, Marilyn still clung to a straw of hope that she could retrieve Yves Montand.

  News of Marilyn’s divorce plans had led to a new surge of speculation about the Frenchman. Reports from France suggested there was a real crisis between Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret. Such rumors, apparently, were not unfounded. In the week before Christmas 1960, Pat Newcomb, the press aide who would henceforth be one of Marilyn’s closest intimates, was present in Marilyn’s apartment as the marital drama was being played out. Montand was due in New York any day, and Marilyn expected to see him again. Then Simone Signoret, swallowing her pride, telephoned Marilyn out of the blue. Marilyn asked Newcomb to listen in on the extension.

  ‘Simone begged Marilyn not to see Montand, to please leave him alone,’ Newcomb recalled. ‘I felt so awful. Here was this wonderful woman, such a fine person, pleading with Marilyn.’

  Montand did not come to New York. He canceled his trip at the last minute, and Marilyn, said Newcomb, was ‘devastated.’

  That Christmas, according to her maid, Lena Pepitone, Marilyn again came close to suicide. Pepitone found her standing by her bedroom window, ‘clutching the outside molding.’ When the maid grabbed her around the waist Marilyn cried, ‘Lena, no. Let me die. I want to die. I deserve to die. What have I done with my life? Who do I have? It’s Christmas.’

  The rescuer, at Christmas 1960, was Joe DiMaggio. He had always been available, and now, in the knowledge of the breakup with Miller, he came running. By one account, he arrived on Marilyn’s doorstep on Christmas morning bearing a massive poinsettia plant.

  Pepitone said DiMaggio began to appear regularly at dinner time, dressed in his sober city suit, entering discreetly by the service elevator. He would depart early in the morning, before other callers arrived.

  In the first days of 1961 Marilyn’s deterioration was evident. She had disturbed her lawyer over Christmas to ask about making a new will. She made no secret of her drug abuse. Friends watched her taking her barbiturates in the morning, like a ritual, pricking the capsules with a pin to speed the effect.

  Some nights, during this desperate time, Marilyn sought comfort and shelter at the apartment of Paula and Lee Strasberg. She would use the bedroom of their son, John, and he would camp on the couch in the living room. John Strasberg vividly recalled the night he awoke to find Marilyn standing beside him dressed in a nightgown. John, then nineteen, did not know how to cope with a woman in her thirties, muttering vaguely about being ‘kind of lonely … needing to talk. …’

  John’s sister, Susan, told of Marilyn, groggy on pills and alcohol, crawling ‘on her hands and knees to my parents’ doorway, scratching at it with her fingernails. …’

  On January 20, 1961, at eight o’clock in the evening, a judge once again opened his office as a special favor to Marilyn Monroe. This time the scene was Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the task the dissolution of the four-and-a-half year marriage between Marilyn and Arthur Miller. Marilyn, accompanied by Pat Newcomb and a Mexican lawyer, requested the divorce on the grounds of ‘incompatibility of character.’ A lawyer representing Miller said the desire to separate was mutual.

  Dressed in black, Marilyn signed the papers without reading them, then fought her way out through the paparazzi. In an effort to dodge publicity, Marilyn had chosen the day of President Kennedy’s inauguration to fly to Mexico. She was back in New York by lunchtime the next day.

  In the loneliness after the divorce, Marilyn was back in touch with Jim Haspiel, by then a constant friend, who had kept h
is distance during the Miller years. She was to shock him with the gift of a photograph inscribed, ‘For the one and only Jimmy, my friend. Love you, Marilyn.’ ‘Only Jimmy’ was heavily underlined, and Haspiel, by that time a grown man, reflected sadly on Marilyn’s implication that she had no real friends.

  Early February saw the first reviews of The Misfits, many of them highly critical. One said of Marilyn’s role, ‘It really expresses no more than a neurotic individuality and symbolizes little.’ Even Haspiel, who was always frank with Marilyn, phoned to say he disliked the film.

  The next day John Huston’s prediction came true earlier than he had foreseen. Marilyn entered a mental hospital.

  28

  THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC Clinic lay at the heart of the New York Hospital — Cornell Medical Center, a white brick skyscraper overlooking Manhattan’s East River. It had been recommended to Marilyn by her regular New York psychiatrist, Dr Marianne Kris. She had been visited by her patient no less than forty-seven times in the past two months. Now she persuaded Marilyn that she needed specialist treatment to arrest the slide into drugged oblivion.

  Hospital, for Marilyn, had usually meant a pampered rest cure. In those terms, her reception at Payne Whitney came as a sharp shock.

  Marilyn arrived at the Clinic enveloped in a huge fur coat. She registered as ‘Faye Miller,’ and was ushered to a room on a floor reserved for ‘moderately disturbed’ patients. By her own account, she at once felt more prisoner than patient. The door was locked from the outside, her clothes were taken away, there was no door on the bathroom, and phone calls were strictly limited.

  Marilyn later told Susan Strasberg, ‘I was always afraid I was crazy like my mother, but when I got in that psycho ward I realized they were really insane — I just had a lot of problems.’

  A Payne Whitney nurse, interviewed years later by Life magazine, recalled how Marilyn stood behind her door shouting again and again, ‘Open that door! I won’t make any trouble, just let me out! Please! Open the door!’ The door stayed closed.