The terror was on Marilyn again. With Joan Greenson listening, she had sat in the bathtub to rehearse, turning ‘Happy Birthday’ into a seduction serenade. She would falter, muttering that she would never be able to pull it off. Joan Greenson had then lent her a children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, about a broken-down train that tried and tried, and finally made it over the mountains. Marilyn took it with her to New York, for reassurance.
In her Manhattan apartment, Marilyn practiced her special lyrics hour upon hour, singing along to a rehearsal record. The gala organizers instructed her to drop in a couple of extra lines of her own, sly little political digs concocted with the help of Danny Greenson. She was still bungling even the well-known birthday refrain, and the President was forewarned by telephone. He laughed heartily. As the moment approached, heavy shots of liquor were added to the comfort of The Little Engine That Could. By the time Marilyn was waiting in the wings at the Garden, she was drunk. Sewn, literally, into her dress, she could hardly move.
Out in the vast auditorium sat the Kennedy brothers. Robert was with his wife, but the President had come alone. In spite of the glamour of the occasion, the First Lady was in Virginia — horseback riding.
John Kennedy sat in the presidential box, feet up on the rail, chomping contentedly on a cigar. With the show in full swing, Peter Lawford took the microphone to start a running gag.
‘Mr President,’ he announced, ‘on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual. Mr President — Marilyn Monroe!’ The audience cheered, but no Marilyn appeared.
Later, after acts by other stars, the brother-in-law coughed, looked over his shoulder, and again announced: ‘A woman of whom it may truly be said — she needs no introduction.’ On a drum roll, nothing happened.
Marilyn was to be the finale. At last Lawford said, ‘Mr President, because, in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much, who has done more —’(here the audience tittered) ‘Mr President—’ (a heavy emphasis now) ‘the late Marilyn Monroe!’
In the wings, Lawford’s agent, Milt Ebbins, virtually propelled Marilyn onto the stage. For a long thirty seconds she collected herself. Then, soft and hesitant, she began:
Happy — birthday — to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday Mr Pres — id — ent,
Happy birthday to you.
After applause, Marilyn went on — with no mistakes — into the special verse written by Richard Adler to the tune of ‘Thanks for the Memory’:
Thanks, Mr President,
For all the things you’ve done,
The battles that you’ve won,
The way you deal with U.S. Steel,
And our problems by the ton,
We thank you — so much.
Marilyn led the throng in a birthday chorus, and stepped away from the microphone. Then the President said, ‘Thank you. I can now retire from politics after having had, ah, “Happy Birthday” sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.’
After the gala, at a backstage gathering, Marilyn introduced the President to her former father-in-law, Isadore Miller, whom she had invited along that evening. Later she appeared at a smaller party given by Arthur Krim, President of United Artists. Arthur Schlesinger, then Special Assistant at the White House, observed her there. He was ‘enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her — as if talking to someone under water.’
Adlai Stevenson, the American representative at the United Nations, recalled getting to Marilyn ‘only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.’
Schlesinger, who included himself among the moths, wrote in his journal: ‘Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me — but then she receded into her own glittering mist.’
Marilyn was back in Hollywood for work on Monday morning. The next day, a special hush descended over Stage 14 at Twentieth Century-Fox. Marilyn, back from the East Coast in apparently high spirits, was about to do a swimming scene for Something’s Got to Give. It was scripted as a nude midnight dip, and she first entered the water in a flesh-colored bikini. The cameraman complained that it was obvious she was wearing a bathing suit. Marilyn consulted with director George Cukor, then vanished into her dressing room.
Minutes later she was back, as an electrician called to a colleague that one of the overhead lights was not bright enough. ‘Bobby,’ he called to the lighting operator, ‘will you make 10-K a little hotter?’
Below, by the pool, Marilyn giggled. ‘I hope Bobby is a girl,’ she said. Then she shrugged off her blue robe and slipped naked into the water.
Cukor had cleared the set of all casual bystanders, but had not said why. So it was that three still photographers, on routine call for the studio, found themselves snapping away, oblivious at first that they were taking the first nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe since the famous calendar pictures of a dozen years earlier.
William Woodfield, one of the still photographers, recalled, ‘We didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. We couldn’t really see much while she was in the water. Then, as she came out of the pool, it was suddenly very apparent that she was wearing nothing. The motor drives on our Nikons were whirring, we were taking pictures as fast as we could — and then she was gone.’
The fact that Marilyn had performed naked promptly made news. It brought welcome publicity for the studio, and generous comments about Marilyn’s fine state of physical preservation. Her figure, the world was informed, was still a miraculous 37-22-35. The next month, Life magazine printed a series of pictures revealing enough to show that Marilyn was naked but fairly decorous all the same.
Meanwhile, as they rushed their films to processing, Woodfield and his colleagues realized they were sitting on a gold mine. ‘Some of the pictures showed nipples and her behind,’ Woodfield remembered, ‘and we couldn’t release them without Marilyn’s personal permission. So we went to see her. She said, in effect, “Look, fellas, what I want is to push Liz Taylor off the magazine covers around the world. Let me look through the photographs, and take out what I want — and you get me on the covers.”’
The photographers mounted a slick marketing operation. After Marilyn had checked the pictures (she deleted very few), they created an air of drama by placing the originals in a bank vault. Then they sent a set of copies to Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, which, in 1962, was the only possible American market for such pictures. Hefner made a deal for a record price of $25,000, and global sales brought the total to more than $150,000.
Woodfield said with feeling, ‘It had been a good morning’s work. …’ In 1949, when Norma Jeane had posed for the nude calendar, she had been paid $50, and the photographer made $200. Playboy, as it turned out, published its pictures of the nude swim after a delay of more than a year, a decent interval after Marilyn’s death.
On June 1, Marilyn was thirty-six. That evening, a mink beret perched on her head, she stood misty-eyed behind a cake adorned with crackling sparklers. It was her turn to listen to ‘Happy Birthday,’ raggedly sung by the crew of Something’s Got to Give. Her stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, had arranged for the cake, which was decorated with two replicas of Marilyn in scenes from the movie, one in a négligée and one in a bikini. The inscription on the cake read: ‘Happy Birthday (Suit).’
Later that evening at Dodger Stadium, Marilyn threw out the first ball in a baseball game for the benefit of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Studio executives, fearing more illness, had begged her not to go. She went anyway, partly because she had promised to take Dean Martin’s young son. Then she dined with a friend, and went home to drink champagne with Danny and Joan Greenson, sitting on cardboard boxes in the half-furnished house.
The Greensons gave her a champagne glass with
her name engraved inside. ‘Now,’ Marilyn said, ‘I’ll know who I am when I’m drinking.’
Her birthday had been on a Friday. Within forty-eight hours Marilyn called Dr Greenson’s son and daughter at home. She sounded heavily drugged, said she was unhappy, and they hurried over.
‘She was in bed naked, with just a sheet over her,’ Danny Greenson remembered, ‘and she was wearing a black sleeping mask, like the Lone Ranger wore. It was the least erotic sight you could imagine. This woman was desperate. She couldn’t sleep — it was the middle of the afternoon — and she said how terrible she felt about herself, how worthless she felt. She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She said she had no one, that nobody loved her. She mentioned not having children. It was a whole litany of depressive thoughts. She said it wasn’t worth living any more.’
Nothing the younger Greensons said could reassure Marilyn. With their father on vacation out of the country, they called in one of his psychiatrist colleagues. He saw the array of pill bottles by the bed, and promptly swept them into his bag. There was nothing more the Greensons could do, so they left.
The crisis continued all the next week. Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, called the studio to say Marilyn was sick. The next day, unable to use the phone herself, Marilyn got Eunice Murray to call Dr Greenson in Europe with a list of questions that seemed urgent to her. Mrs Murray said she could not remember what the questions were.
On Thursday that week, her black wig crammed on her head, Marilyn went for a nose X ray. She also consulted Dr Michael Gurdin, a plastic surgeon, complaining of a nose injury. Gurdin remembered being told she had ‘slipped in the shower.’ Mrs Murray said she cannot remember either the injury or the medical visits.
Meanwhile, at Fox, the curtain was falling on the famous career. The producers, viewing the rushes of Something’s Got to Give, saw a Marilyn who was acting ‘in a kind of slow motion that was hypnotic.’ Director George Cukor was shaken by what he saw, and top executives were talking about finding a replacement for her.
Dr Greenson called Henry Weinstein, the producer, to say he was on his way home. He would, he promised, have Marilyn back on the set by Monday. Greenson flew to Los Angeles at once, arriving late at night, and drove straight to his patient’s house. He was too late. On Friday, Marilyn had been fired. Then the movie was canceled altogether.
‘The star system has got way out of hand,’ said Fox Executive Vice-President Peter Levathes. ‘We’ve let the inmates run the asylum and they’ve practically destroyed it.’ He was speaking three days after Marilyn’s dismissal, as Something’s Got to Give collapsed in a tempest of recriminations and lawsuits. The studio sued Marilyn for half a million dollars. When Dean Martin refused to work with any other actress, they sued him too.
Marilyn, for her part, rushed off telegrams to all and sundry. Members of the Give crew had placed a sardonic announcement in Variety, ‘thanking’ her for putting them out of work. She responded with a message to each of them saying, ‘Please believe me. It was not my doing. I so looked forward to working with you.’ She reached Frank Sinatra, then in Monte Carlo, and he asked the attorney they shared, Milton Rudin, to intercede with the studio.
Less than two months later, on Marilyn’s death, it would be said she died in a state of depression following professional disgrace. Yet Marilyn did not weep long over the dismissal. Indeed, as the studio realized, nobody could replace Monroe, and negotiations soon began to reinstate her. Meanwhile, Marilyn embarked on a remarkable series of advertisements for herself.
Within two weeks of being fired, she was engaged in lengthy interviews and photographic sessions with three major magazines, Life, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan.
‘Thirty-six,’ Marilyn told one interviewer, ‘is just great when kids twelve to seventeen still whistle.’ Susan Strasberg, daughter of her coach, told her she was looking good. ‘You know,’ Marilyn responded, ‘I am in better shape than I’ve ever been in. My body looks better now than when I was a young girl.’ To prove it, she pulled up her blouse to show off her breasts.
In the few weeks that remained to her, Marilyn sought to show that her body could graduate through sixteen years, from Laff and Peek to the glossies of the sixties, without losing allure. For Life, she swung from the rafters in sweater and pants. At Peter Lawford’s beach house, for Cosmopolitan, she posed with champagne glass in hand, and stood windswept, in a Mexican sweater, at the ocean’s edge.
In extraordinary night sessions for Vogue, at the Bel-Air Hotel, Marilyn indulged her exhibitionism one last time. Alone with the photographer and the bottles of champagne, she posed in furs, and nude behind a diaphanous scarf. Finally she was photographed completely naked. The camera saw the weariness, the slash in the belly — a legacy of the gall bladder operation — but the cameraman saw some sort of immortality.
‘Marilyn had the power,’ photographer Bert Stern wrote two decades later. ‘She was the wind, that comet shape that Blake draws blowing around a sacred figure. She was the light, and the goddess, and the moon. The space and the dream, the mystery and the danger. But everything else all together too, including Hollywood, and the girl next door that every guy wants to marry. I could have hung up the camera, run off with her, lived happily ever after. …’
Another observer was not so overwhelmed. Life, which had been negotiating with Marilyn since the weekend of the President’s birthday gala, sent reporter Richard Meryman to Los Angeles. He was thirty-six, Marilyn’s own age, fresh from the position of Religion Editor in Life’s ‘Manners and Morals’ department. The magazine was preparing a series on Fame, and Marilyn’s aide, Pat Newcomb, had suggested her client as a subject. Meryman rented a tape-recorder, which he did not know how to operate, and made his way to the house in Brentwood. His interview, which Marilyn saw in print a couple of days before she died, stands as her last public testament.
Meryman was sitting in the living room, tinkering with the recorder, when a voice said, ‘Can I help?’ The reporter’s eye moved up a pair of bright yellow pants to the famous face.
‘I was struck,’ he recalled, ‘by how pasty her skin was — pasty and lifeless-looking. There was not much health in that skin. It wasn’t white and it wasn’t gray. It was a little bit coarse, lifeless. It looked like skin that had had makeup on it for a long, long time. She looked terrific, but when you really studied that face, it was kind of cardboardy. Her hair was lifeless, had no body in it, like hair that had been primped and heated and blown a thousand times.’
Meryman and Marilyn got on well. He had been asked to supply questions in advance, and at their first encounter Marilyn offered rehearsed answers. After all the years in the business, she was still preparing, just as she had for the Robert Kennedy dinner party. Gradually she relaxed, and Meryman listened as she chattered to a friend on the telephone, her high, squeaky laughter echoing through the bare rooms. The laughter was somehow troubling; it went on too long, did not seem normal.
Pat Newcomb was ever-present. Later, Meryman would remember her as ‘obsessively loyal, totally devoted. She had made herself Marilyn’s last friend.’ Covertly, Marilyn apologized for Newcomb, shrugging her shoulders as if to say, ‘What can I do?’ Newcomb said she only attended the interview at Marilyn’s insistence.
Marilyn told Meryman she wanted no pictures taken of her house. ‘I don’t want everybody to see exactly where I live,’ she explained. She talked — eloquently but as she had always talked — of her deprived childhood. She talked of acting, of her allegiance to the ordinary people who made up her audiences rather than to the studio. ‘An actor,’ she said, ‘is not a machine.’
‘I’ve always felt,’ said Marilyn, ‘that the people ought to get their money’s worth, and that this is an obligation. I do have feelings some days when there are some scenes with a lot of responsibility towards the meaning and I’ll wish, gee, if only I could have been a cleaning woman. I think all actors go through this. We n
ot only want to be good; we have to be. …’
‘Fame has a special burden,’ Marilyn told the Life reporter. ‘I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it — everything.’
Marilyn talked with yearning of the stepchildren she had found and lost in the DiMaggio and Miller marriages. Again and again, she came back to ‘kids, and older people, and workingmen,’ the people who were no threat, who understood her. When Meryman left, late that first night, he said he would bring a transcript the next day. Marilyn was glad. ‘I don’t sleep very well,’ she said. ‘It’ll give me something to read at night.’
Meryman went back to the Hilton thinking that he had interviewed a woman he liked, a woman who was ‘very smart.’ ‘I felt very keenly,’ he recalled, ‘that Marilyn knew what she was doing every minute I was there. She was sculpting herself for me, for Life, for the situation, whatever it really was.’
He returned several times. Marilyn read his transcript carefully, tinkered with it little. She seemed particularly concerned to make sure she had said nothing that would hurt her stepchildren, and emended those paragraphs with skill and honesty. Once, when Meryman came by appointment, he rang the doorbell in vain, although it was obvious there were people in the house. Another time, when he did get in, Marilyn went out to the kitchen and returned holding up a little ampule. ‘No kidding,’ she said, ‘they’re making me take liver shots.’
‘The last time I came,’ Meryman recalled, ‘she came to the door, and talked about the flowers in the garden. I walked down the drive and she stood at the door and watched me, and called to me, and said, “Hey, thanks!” I felt sad for her. It was very touching, that little girl thing was very strong.’
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Page 37
