Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  What happened next, Marilyn would later insist, occurred because she decided: ‘Okay, if you’re going to treat me like a nut, I’m going to act like one.’

  According to another member of the staff, Marilyn stripped off her clothing and stood naked at the window. She was then taken to a security ward on the ninth floor, where she threw a chair through a glass door.

  The hospital nurse told Life: ‘We felt so protective toward her. She made us all feel like we wanted to hold her in our laps. We wanted to soothe her, wanted to say, “It’s all right now.” It was the feeling lonely, small children give you. You know, sort of dry their tears and pat them on the head and hold their hands.’

  Months later, in California, Marilyn offered her lurid version of the experience to her friend Gloria Romanoff. ‘It was like a nightmare,’ she said. ‘They had me in a restrainer. They had me sedated, but not so sedated that I didn’t know what was going on. You’ll find this hard to believe, but at night there was a steady procession of hospital personnel, doctors and nurses, coming to look at me. There I was, with my arms bound. I was not able to defend myself. I was a curiosity piece, with no one who had my interests at heart.’

  The press soon discovered Marilyn had been admitted to the Clinic, but spokesmen would say only that she suffered from ‘an illness of undetermined origin.’ One doctor denied the illness was schizophrenia, but said Marilyn was ‘psychiatrically disconnected in an acute way because she works too hard.’

  Marilyn, meanwhile, fought to be released. Here, complete with misspellings, is the note she dashed off to the Strasbergs:

  Dear Lee and Paula,

  Dr Kris has had me put into the New York Hospital — pstikiatric division under the care of two idiot doctors. they both should not be my doctors.

  You haven’t heard from me because I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare. please help me Lee, this is the last place I should be — maybe if you called Dr Kris and assured her of my sensitivity and that I must get back to class … Lee, I try to remember what you said once in class ‘that art goes far beyond science’

  And the science memories around here I’d like to forget — like screeming women etc.

  please help me — if Dr Kris assures you I am all right you can assure her I am not. I do not belong here!

  I love you both

  Marilyn

  P.S. forgive the spelling — and theres nothing to write on here. I’m on the dangerous floor its like a cell. can you imagine — cement blocks they put me in her because they lied to me about calling my doctor and Joe and they had the bathroom door locked so I broke the glass and out side of that I havnt done anything that is uncooperative

  It was Joe DiMaggio, not the Strasbergs, who arranged for Marilyn’s discharge from the Clinic. She had used one of her ration of calls to telephone him in Florida, and he flew to New York at once. In the evening of her fourth day at the Clinic Marilyn was smuggled out through a basement passageway. She spent the next three weeks in the neurological department of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. There were no more stories of hysteria and high drama.

  News film of Marilyn’s departure from this second hospital shows a mob of reporters disgracing themselves in a way unprecedented in all the years of covering her personal miseries. Marilyn was propelled into a waiting limousine by a flying wedge of sixteen policemen and hospital security staff.

  The New York Journal-American outdid all rivals with an utterly tasteless story. The report quoted Marilyn as saying, ‘I feel wonderful.’ Then it added:

  All’s well with the world, men, so fear not, fear not. Marilyn’s face still has the ethereal rose-petal texture, the smile’s as delicately soft as ever, the figure — ah, yes, the figure — and best of all they’ve untied the knots in her nerves.

  Norman Rosten, who visited Marilyn several times in the hospital, had a different verdict. ‘She was ill,’ he wrote later, ‘not only of the body and mind, but of the soul, the innermost engine of desire. That light was missing from her eyes.’

  For many weeks that spring Marilyn was propped up by Joe DiMaggio, the husband who had been unable to forget. No other woman had replaced Marilyn in his life and, when she permitted it, he offered some stability. Marilyn flew to see him in Florida, where he had been training his old team, the New York Yankees. Later, in New York, Marilyn’s staff were again aware that DiMaggio sometimes stayed overnight. Rumors buzzed that they were thinking of remarrying. Marilyn, however, was in no condition to commit herself to anything at all.

  Months earlier, plans had been made for Marilyn to play the part of Sadie Thompson in a television dramatization of Rain, the Somerset Maugham short story. The plans were shelved.

  There had also been talk of her playing in Freud, which John Huston was about to make from a screenplay by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre thought Marilyn ‘one of the greatest actresses alive,’ and Marilyn was first choice to play the part of Cecily, one of Freud’s psychotic patients. Dr Greenson, her California psychiatrist, advised against it — in part because Freud’s daughter, whom Greenson knew, did not want the film made. Privately, Greenson must have balked at the upset such a role would have meant for Marilyn.

  Marilyn did not work at all in 1961. Twice that summer she found herself back in hospital beds, this time for physical ailments. In May, in Los Angeles, there was yet another gynecological operation. Doctors now determined that her Fallopian tubes were blocked, apparently as a result of inept surgery following some earlier abortion.

  A month later, in New York, Marilyn was carried on a stretcher into the Polyclinic Hospital, clutching a sheet over her face. The problem this time was an acutely inflamed gall bladder. Dr Richard Cottrell, who handled the case, was appalled to find that behind the glamorous exterior was a creature plagued with physical problems.

  Gall bladder aside, Marilyn suffered frequent abnormal bleeding from the uterus, and also had an ulcerated colon. Dr Cottrell thought this last complaint was the result of ‘a chronic fear neurosis,’ and he found his patient ‘highly nervous, frightened, and confused.’ In pain after the operation, Marilyn once again had to be restrained.

  The last scene of The Misfits, one of hope, had Gable and Marilyn driving into the night, following a star that would guide them home. Now, in the hospital, Marilyn stepped onto her balcony with Dr Cottrell and gazed up at the sky. ‘Look at the stars,’ she murmured. ‘They are all up there shining so brightly, but each one must be so very much alone.’ Later she muttered despondently, ‘It’s a make-believe world, isn’t it?’

  Dr Cottrell was not quite sure what to make of Marilyn. He did notice that, perhaps thinking of her origins, she had registered at the hospital under the name Norma Jean Baker.* It was a name she had not used for years.

  Reality, in 1961, was harsh. Her New York secretary, Marjorie Stengel, whose employers have included Montgomery Clift and Faye Dunaway, would remember Marilyn, at thirty-five, as ‘the emptiest human being I have ever encountered.’ Stengel told her hairdresser, who was pleading for insights into the life of the world’s most celebrated star, ‘My dear, in twenty-four hours your life is more busy and more glamorous than Marilyn Monroe’s is in two weeks.’

  Stengel found that Marilyn’s apartment was now ‘filthy dirty, and depressing, with dog stains all over the carpets.’ She said, ‘Really, her life was nothing. She did not see friends, she didn’t go out, I never saw her really read anything — except once, Harold Robbins — she didn’t do anything. There were phone calls, long secretive phone calls conducted in another room, often with her analyst in California. It was creepy.’

  The Marilyn Stengel remembers had become habitually foul-mouthed, a woman who more and more talked in harsh tones, nothing like the breathless baby voice of legend.

  For all the psychiatrists’ efforts, drugs were still a permanent feature. Stengel said, ‘Her apartment was littered with half-empty pill bottles, made out to my name, her
name, friends’ names. Some doctors will do that for you, if you’re rich and famous.’

  On her visits to California, a young hairdresser named George Masters had begun to work for Marilyn. He would recall seeing her soon after the gall bladder operation ‘wearing a ripped terry-cloth robe. She said she was living on caviar, champagne, and hard-boiled eggs. She could let herself look like an old bag for two weeks. She’d smell sometimes and never comb her hair for weeks. That’s why it would take nine hours to get her ready and recreate Marilyn Monroe.’

  Once Marilyn summoned Masters from California to New York to do her hair, then met him at the door to say she was sorry, she was too tired to see him. By way of consolation, she handed him a check for two thousand dollars.

  Masters, too, observed Marilyn’s drug-taking. ‘I remember one time,’ he said, ‘when she offered me a pill, a Nembutal, like other people offer you a drink. I kept it under my lip, and spat it out afterwards. I think she popped the pills early in the morning. She’d keep me waiting for two hours while she was in the bathroom, supposedly washing her face. For two hours! I mean, that’s very strange.’

  ‘When I was working on her,’ Masters said, ‘she would start transforming, almost like a chameleon. Her voice would begin to change, and her actions. I would get goose bumps as she started changing into Marilyn Monroe.’

  Masters had the impression that Marilyn had become ‘asexual. I think if she had any drive at all by then it was to conquer men. That was the challenge, and I think that turned her on. I think she was two people, maybe even three — herself, Marilyn Monroe, and the asexual, calculating person only concerned with herself.’

  In autumn 1961 a malodorous smell drifted into the Los Angeles apartment occupied by Jeanne Carmen — in a small building three blocks south of Sunset Strip. It came, Carmen discovered, from the garbage pail in which Marilyn Monroe was jettisoning used wound dressings, necessary for a while in the aftermath of her gall bladder operation.

  Marilyn had returned to the same apartment on Doheny that she had used in the early fifties, and in Jeanne Carmen she rediscovered an old friend. The two had met years earlier at the Actors Studio in New York, and now, as neighbors, became close.

  The place on Doheny was a low, nondescript corner building. Marilyn’s mailbox bore not her name but that of her East Coast secretary, Marjorie Stengel. Marilyn’s apartment was one of a number clustered around a courtyard. A dark hallway led into a large and even darker bedroom, a room of almost Stygian gloom thanks to heavy blackout curtains over the windows. Originally designed as the living room, it was now dominated by an enormous double bed. The apartment had become, as one friend put it, ‘a shrine to sleeping.’ It contained no pictures and few personal possessions.

  Here at Doheny, Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen whiled away the time, and especially the night hours, talking and drinking. Carmen, at twenty-seven some eight years younger than Marilyn, was a would-be actress who sometimes used the name Saber Dareaux. She had begun her career like Marilyn, as a cover girl for girlie magazines, then graduated to parts in minor movies.

  Carmen had a brilliant talent for golf, and worked it up into a trick golf act that brought her television appearances all over the country. She shared doctors with Marilyn — both visited Dr Lee Siegel and gynecologist Leon Krohn — and they held fervent discussions on injections to enlarge the bust, and surgery to narrow the vagina.

  To Carmen, Marilyn’s drinking capacity seemed ‘Olympic standard.’ On the subject of drugs, though, the two had much in common. ‘I had gotten addicted to sleeping pills while I was living in Vegas,’ said Carmen, ‘and we became sleeping-pill buddies. We were both using Seconal and Nembutal, and we’d borrow each other’s prescriptions. But I was knocked out on two or three a night; Marilyn was using a tremendous amount when I met her. …’

  The two talked about men and sex. Marilyn talked about the baby she claimed she had had as a teenager, and of her fear that God would ‘punish’ her for not keeping it. ‘From what she told me,’ Carmen said, ‘Marilyn got nothing out of sex at all. She’d never had an orgasm — she used to fake it.’

  ‘She was so insecure,’ Carmen recalled. ‘She was sure that she’d lose even her best friends if she ever got old and ugly and down and out. …’

  Marilyn was still talking about suicide. ‘There’s no way out for me except death,’ she would say when in her cups. ‘I’d want to go out in white, in a white satin nightgown and with white satin pillows. And I’d have someone come in and close my eyes and make me look beautiful. How about you doing it for me?’

  In May that year, after her experience at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Marilyn had turned to Dr Ralph Greenson for her full-time psychiatric care. Greenson, distressed at Marilyn’s ‘terrible loneliness,’ now made a decision — a highly unusual one in his tradition of psychiatry — to open his own home to Marilyn.

  Greenson was to be criticized for this decision by some of his psychiatrist colleagues. At the time, said his widow, he felt he was providing a little of what Marilyn most lacked, security and a sense of family. He was also genuinely touched by this thirty-five-year-old waif. From now, until she died, Greenson’s wife and two children acted as a virtual foster family for Marilyn.

  The Greensons lived in a fine Mexican-style house at the summit of the only hill in Santa Monica, and to spare Marilyn needless exposure at his office, Dr Greenson usually received her there. Uncharacteristically, perhaps because Greenson said unpunctuality was a sign of disliking someone, Marilyn started arriving early. Greenson’s daughter Joan, a twenty-one-year-old art student, would greet Marilyn when the doctor was not ready for her, and the two would amble along by the nearby reservoir, gazing out over the city and the Pacific Ocean.

  For Joan Greenson the experience was unnerving but fascinating. Soon she was visiting the great star at her apartment, driving her around town, and beginning an unusual friendship. Marilyn offered advice about boyfriends, helped with makeup — she showed Joan how to bleach the hair shadowing her upper lip — and the two of them swapped clothes.

  ‘The Twist craze was just starting,’ Joan recalled, ‘so she taught me her version of the Twist, and how to do a bump-and-grind — one you could see on TV, not anything lewd. Marilyn treated me in a sense as a younger sister. She never let me see pictures of her nude, would never allude to the fact that she slept with anybody. She presented herself to me as a very virginal creature.’

  Danny Greenson, Joan’s twenty-four-year-old brother, had not expected to get on with Marilyn. He was a student, politically radical by contemporary standards, and he expected ‘a rich Hollywood bitch.’ Instead he found himself drawn to a woman who was ‘in no way put on or artificial, with a real warmth.’ Marilyn, in her black wig, went along with Danny when he was apartment hunting. They talked politics, and he found her sympathetic to his leftist opinions.

  Marilyn was seeing Dr Greenson six, even seven, times a week. Because her appointments were at the doctor’s home and he had to return from his office, she was usually the last patient of the day. She sat upright in a chair facing Greenson across his study, pouring out her troubles for the allotted hour. Then she and the psychiatrist would emerge to join the family, as often as not, for a drink. Marilyn’s personal bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, perhaps a bit flat if she had brought it along on a previous occasion, would be produced from the refrigerator. Sometimes Marilyn would stay to dinner and join in the washing up, often throwing in the evergreen story of how she had once done kitchen chores at the orphanage.

  Greenson wrote hopefully in May 1961, before Marilyn’s gall bladder operation and the decline that followed, that she was ‘doing quite well.’ He added: ‘I am appalled at the emptiness of her life in terms of object relations. Essentially, it is such a narcissistic way of life. … All in all, there’s been some improvement, but I do not vouch for how deep it is, or how lasting.’

  Three weeks later, on her thirty-fifth birthday, Marilyn sent Dr Greenson a tel
egram, reading:

  DEAR DR GREENSON IN THIS WORLD OF PEOPLE I’M GLAD THERE’S YOU. I HAVE A FEELING OF HOPE THOUGH TODAY I AM THREE FIVE. MARILYN.

  Marilyn’s telegram to her psychiatrist on her thirty-fifth birthday, June 1, 1961.

  Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1961, Marilyn had uttered a momentous confidence to Gordon Heaver, an Englishman she had known for many years. Heaver had lived in Hollywood throughout the fifties, was a story editor at Paramount Pictures, worked on several Hitchcock films, and married into money. He prided himself on his recall of facts — Hitchcock had dubbed him ‘Mr Memory,’ after a character in The Thirty-nine Steps.

  In early January 1961, Heaver said, Marilyn told him she had recently had ‘a date with the next President of the United States.’ From the way she said it, Heaver did not doubt that Marilyn meant she had been to bed with John Kennedy. The conversation took place just weeks before the President’s inauguration. Kennedy’s inauguration and Marilyn’s divorce made news at the same time.

  The affair with the President, and the ramifications that connect with Robert Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and his friends, was to become the cornerstone of the legend of the last days of Marilyn Monroe. Within less than two years, in the aura of those involvements, Marilyn would die.

  *Baker was the name of Marilyn’s mother’s first husband, gone before she was born.

  Part Four

  MARILYN AND THE KENNEDY BROTHERS

  ‘Marilyn Monroe never told anybody everything.’

  PAT NEWCOMB,

  Marilyn’s press assistant and close friend of the Kennedys

  ‘There is danger for the man who snatches a delusion from a woman.’

  PERSIAN SAYING,

  quoted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  29

  ON A WARM SUMMER NIGHT IN the second week of July 1960, just before the filming of The Misfits, two men in a car had cruised along the Pacific shoreline north of Santa Monica, California. They drove past a group of grand beachfront homes, weaved around a muddle of double-parked cars, and quietly drew into the curb. Then they took off their shoes, padded down to the edge of the surf, and began walking back the way they had come.