Marilyn Monroe

by Michelle Morgan

  Even Somerset Maugham was delighted with her plans and made no secret of letting her know: ‘I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie . . . I am sure you will be splendid,’ he wrote in January 1961.

  Negotiations began in earnest and newspapers were buzzing with the news that Marilyn could be turning her hand to television. On 6 January, executive producer Ann Marlowe told newspapers: ‘I started to work on the idea of ‘Rain’ and Marilyn Monroe a year ago. Although her agents never had been able to get her to do television, I talked to her about it and she said she was interested but would have to wait until she finished a picture and came back to New York. When she returned from the coast, we started working on it and now the lawyers are drawing up contracts.’

  Marilyn’s press rep got in on the act with a statement declaring, ‘It is not firm yet but the deal is pretty sure,’ while newspapers reported that Marilyn herself was determined to include Lee Strasberg in the production and was considering giving her fee to the Actors Studio.

  But it wasn’t all work. During January 1961, Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio began seeing each other on a regular basis, and although they wished to keep their renewed friendship secret, it took only days for the press to start reporting reconciliation. The rumours became so persistent that on 11 January John Springer confirmed that they had been seeing each other again, but played down any romance. Marilyn herself later denied any romance to columnist Louella Parsons: ‘Believe me, no matter what the gossip columns say, there is no spark rekindled between Joe and me.’ For once Joe was happy to be just friends, and even admitted that he didn’t blame Marilyn for divorcing him in 1954: ‘I’d have divorced me too,’ he said.

  Divorce was on Marilyn’s mind too, and on 20 January, she travelled with Pat Newcomb to Juarez, Mexico, in order to obtain a divorce from Miller. Choosing the day of John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration so as to avoid publicity, Marilyn cited ‘incompatibility of character’ at a special night session with Judge Miguel Gomez and her attorney Arturo Sosa Aguilar, before quietly returning to New York. ‘The plane was delayed and I got upset,’ she told reporters; ‘I don’t feel like being bothered with publicity right now, but I would love to have a plate of tacos and enchiladas.’

  Back in New York, the weather was getting Marilyn down considerably. ‘New York was terrible last winter with so much rain and snow. It was depressing,’ she told Hedda Hopper in July 1961. But regardless of her depression, she continued her studies at the Actors Studio and one day was surprised to see W.J. Weatherby, a reporter she had met on the set of The Misfits. Being a fan of Miller, he wasn’t particularly impressed by Marilyn at first, but after seeing her again at the studio, he asked her to have a drink with him at a little bar on the corner of 8th Avenue. She agreed and, over the next few weeks, they met around four times to discuss all manner of subjects, including books, civil rights, actors and personal issues. They even touched upon politics when Marilyn declared that John F. Kennedy spoke a lot of sense, and that she admired his family’s zest for life.

  But despite the interesting conversation, Weatherby noticed sadness in the actress, and was disturbed on one occasion to see that her hair needed washing and she had a faint body odour. There were times, too, when she would not respond when he spoke to her, something she attributed to the pills that made her feel ‘dopey sometimes’. She was certainly in a retrospective mood, confessing that she had put Miller through a lot, and even discussing her feelings when Gable had died, admitting that she had not attended the funeral because she was frightened of breaking down.

  Marilyn also told Weatherby that although she had felt guilty when Gable died, she had now accepted he had a bad heart and it wasn’t her fault. However, she then read in a newspaper that Kay Gable had implied Clark’s death was her fault. There was not a grain of truth in the story, but it was enough to unlock the deep-rooted blame she felt, and sent her once more into a deep depression.

  In just two months, Marilyn had reportedly visited psychiatrist Marianne Kris a staggering forty-seven times. None of the sessions was surely as disturbing as one held towards the beginning of February, when she confessed that after hearing Kay Gable’s quote, she opened her living room window as far as she could, and seriously thought about throwing herself out. The only thing that stopped her was the realization that a lady whom she knew was at that moment walking past the building.

  Kris was obviously alarmed to hear this latest development, and that, coupled with her continuing drug problem, was enough to persuade the doctor that Marilyn needed complete hospital rest. On 6 February the actress telephoned Joe DiMaggio, then on the 7th, just as her lawyers were negotiating for her to have complete control over the Rain production, she checked into the Payne Whitney hospital as Mrs Faye Miller for what was described as, ‘study and treatment of an illness of undisclosed origin’. Unfortunately, and unknown to Marilyn, Payne Whitney was an establishment for disturbed patients, and this became quite apparent within hours of her admittance there.

  Quite alarmingly, on her arrival at the hospital, Marilyn claimed a psychiatrist conducted a physical examination which included a breast inspection. This was something to which Marilyn quite rightly took great exception. Once that was completed, she was taken to her room: a depressing cell-like space complete with cement blocks, bars on the windows and the markings of former patients. Everything was under lock and key, including the bathroom, closets and electric lights, while the main door into the room came complete with a window through which she could be ‘observed’. There was no way of buzzing for assistance.

  In a letter dated 1–2 March 1961, Marilyn told Dr Greenson that she had been encouraged to ‘mingle’ with other patients, and take up such occupational therapies as sewing, knitting and playing checkers. As a person continually reminded of the mental illness that plagued her family, Marilyn was appalled to be placed in such an establishment, and made no hesitation in saying so. ‘Why aren’t you happy in here?’ they asked, to which she replied, ‘I’d have to be nuts if I liked it in here.’

  Deciding to telephone the Strasbergs for help, she stood in line with other patients waiting to use the phone, only to find herself forbidden to make any calls on the orders of a security man. Dismayed, she returned to her room and began thinking of the part she played in Don’t Bother to Knock, in which she had to threaten to hurt herself with a razor blade. This inspired her to do to her own version of this story, and before she knew it, Marilyn was banging on the door with a chair: ‘It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass,’ she later wrote to Dr Greenson, but once she had achieved it, she sat with glass in hand, waiting for the doctors to appear.

  Threatening to harm herself, the arrival of the doctors did nothing to calm Marilyn’s nerves, and quite disturbingly, the four medical staff picked her up by all fours and carried her, face down and sobbing, to the seventh floor – the ward for extremely disturbed patients.

  Told she was a ‘very, very sick girl’, Marilyn was forced to stay at the hospital for four nights, during which time she was able to write a letter to Lee Strasberg, begging for help. Unfortunately, the Strasberg family had no power to secure her release, but thankfully for Marilyn, Joe DiMaggio did. He arrived at the hospital and threatened to take it apart ‘brick by brick’ if they did not release her into his care. Later Marilyn took great pride in telling friends of DiMaggio’s rescue, and consulted her lawyer Aaron Frosch in order to draw up a document that ensured DiMaggio, Frosch and Reis would all have to be notified before she could ever be locked up again. Before she left the hospital she turned to the doctors who had ‘cared’ for her: ‘You should all have your heads examined,’ she told them, before leaving in the care of DiMaggio.

  She was driven back to her apartment to confront Dr Kris, ‘like a hurricane unleashed’, according to friend, Ralph Roberts. Kris was shocked, frightened and deeply apologetic, but the damage was done. Marilyn never forgave her psychiatrist and in future turned to Californian therapi
st Dr Greenson for support.

  Still emotionally disturbed and exhausted, Marilyn was persuaded to enter Columbia-Presbyterian hospital on 11 February, where she was admitted for ‘a rest and checkup’, according to a hospital spokesman. Her publicist, John Springer, elaborated by telling reporters, ‘She is here for a complete physical check-up. She’s had a hell of a year. She had been exhausted, really beat down.’ Trying to quash rumours of her treatment at Payne Whitney, he added, ‘More than anything else, this was just meant for her to go in and have a chance to rest and recuperate a little. It has been blown up all out of proportion.’

  Meanwhile, NBC executives were becoming increasingly alarmed with the situation, declaring to her representatives that they wanted ‘concrete evidence’ that she could physically perform in Rain. This request left her lawyer in the unenviable and impossible task of trying to compile a detailed report of her condition, including whether or not she would be capable of showing up on set at all. On 15 February, a letter was sent from NBC to Marilyn’s reps at MCA, declaring that ‘in view of Miss Monroe’s recent illness, it is perfectly clear that we do not have an agreement with respect to [her] services’.

  But while negotiations were going on behind the scenes, Marilyn was still in hospital, where Joe DiMaggio was a frequent visitor: ‘She went to the hospital for what amounted to exhaustion and nothing more,’ he told reporters. ‘The girl has been working very hard with pictures she has done, and Clark Gable’s death did not help matters.’

  Journalist and author Peter Evans, who had met Marilyn several times during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, was also staying at the same hospital, suffering from dehydration. As he later recalled: ‘All outside calls to her room had been blocked by the switchboard on the orders of Joe DiMaggio, but I discovered it was possible to dial her room directly from my room. I got the number of her room from a friendly nurse, and tried my luck. Marilyn Monroe answered in her unmistakable voice. “Oh,” she said when I told her who I was and how I got through to her. But she didn’t seem to mind. She sounded frail, but was absolutely friendly.’

  She told him, ‘They won’t let me listen to the radio. The news is always so disturbing. Tell me, what’s happening in the outside world?’

  Evans told Marilyn that he had met Arthur Miller several days before, and she asked how he was. She was concerned with his living arrangements, observing that she’d been told he wasn’t comfortable living in a hotel. Evans told her that Arthur was thinking of moving out, though felt the Connecticut house was too large just for him. ‘He said he didn’t like being alone,’ Evans remarked.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Marilyn replied. ‘He should get another wife.’

  Later in the conversation Evans told Marilyn that Arthur was bemoaning the loss of a button on his overcoat. ‘I must get somebody to sew a button on this coat. It’s been off for weeks,’ he had said.

  According to Evans there was then a silence on the line before Marilyn eventually spoke. ‘That is so poignant,’ she said. ‘That is beautiful. It says so much about the end of a marriage. I want to cry. I will write a poem about that missing button.’

  ‘I wondered whether she ever wrote that poem,’ Peter Evans later recalled.

  On Tuesday, 7 March, having been out of hospital for just two days, Marilyn attended the funeral of her former mother-in-law, Augusta Miller, who had suffered a fatal heart attack the day before. Arriving unexpectedly, Marilyn put her own problems to one side and comforted Arthur and Isidore Miller, before leaving quietly to return to her apartment. Then on 10 March she attended a fundraiser for the Actors Studio and appeared to be feeling much better.

  However, just days later, publicist Rupert Allan sent some newspaper clippings to John Springer, which implied that once again Kay Gable was blaming Marilyn for Clark’s death. The story was once again untrue, but knowing Marilyn’s fragile state of mind, Allan instructed Springer not to bring the clippings to her attention. On 17 March, Springer forwarded the comments to lawyer Aaron Frosch, where Marilyn accidentally saw them, sending her into a furious rage. She immediately wrote a note to May Reis, demanding she get Frosch on the telephone so that she could discuss the issue with him, and expressing her anger at Allan for trying to keep ‘this kind of thing away from me’.

  ‘I must know my own business, so I can protect myself. Keeping things from me is no protection,’ she told May Reis.

  By this time, a production schedule for Rain had been compiled, and Marilyn had been due to start pre-production on 13 March, with one week of shooting beginning 27 March. However, because of her illness, NBC took any definite dates off the table. In order to take her mind off this, Joe DiMaggio asked Marilyn if she would like to travel to Florida with him instead. She agreed, and checked into the Tides Hotel at St Petersburg Beach. On her arrival, Marilyn declared, ‘I came down here for some rest, some sun and to visit Joe,’ though it was also an opportunity to regain her strength and recover from the trauma of the past months.

  Always a fan of ‘the man or woman on the street’, whilst staying in St Petersburg Marilyn began a friendship with Lynn Pupello, a teenage reporter who in 1961 won an award for best writer for the American Newspaper Association. ‘I sat near her [on the beach] and struck up a conversation as if she wasn’t famous,’ she remembered. ‘At first she was shy but my enthusiasm won her over.’

  For Marilyn, talking to the young woman was a welcome diversion, though Joe DiMaggio at times seemed to resent her presence, as remembered by Pupello: ‘I wasn’t nervous being with Marilyn. She had a loving nature and ability to put you at ease. Joe DiMaggio was aloof with me; he said “Hello” but wanted to be alone with her, quietly talking. She smiled occasionally but told me she would not reconcile with him because of his bad temper during the night of the skirt-blowing scene in New York City.’

  According to Pupello, during their long conversations Marilyn admitted to having met John F. Kennedy: ‘She said she had been in South Florida before, visiting the President. She lit up speaking of him and said, “he has always been very kind to me.”’ Marilyn had shown an interest in Kennedy during her conversations with W.J. Weatherby, but had not mentioned a meeting, so her comment is an interesting one. She did not make any suggestion to Pupello or Weatherby (at that particular time) that she thought of him in a romantic way, but made no secret of the fact that she was a huge supporter of Kennedy both as a person and a politician.

  Almost immediately on her return to New York, rumours began to circulate that Frank Sinatra had been in Florida at the same time as Marilyn, and that she was in love with him. This is intriguing since on 2 March 1961, whilst staying at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, she wrote a letter to Dr Greenson, admitting to a ‘fling on a wing’ affair with an unnamed man, possibly Sinatra. Marilyn described the lover as being very unselfish in bed, but also admitted that she knew Greenson would not approve of him.

  Marilyn had encountered Sinatra several times over the years, and actress Annabelle Stanford remembers her as being a little less than enamoured with him during a trip to Palm Springs in the late 1940s. ‘A group of us were doing a photo shoot with Bernard of Hollywood, and afterwards we were all having dinner. Frank Sinatra was there and having something of an argument with a male friend. I remember Marilyn looking over, shaking her head and throwing her arms in the air. She was not happy and when the argument continued she left.’

  As a result of a possible romance with Sinatra, any plans DiMaggio may have had to reconcile with Marilyn were put on hold. He was not at all happy that his old friend was being seen around with his ex-wife, but he continued to see Marilyn on a social basis and even attended a baseball game with her at Yankee Stadium on 11 April.

  Ten days before that, on 1 April, Kay Gable wrote a letter to Marilyn, asking when she planned to go to Los Angeles to meet her baby son, John Clark. She told her that she still missed her husband each day but planned to spend the summer at their ranch, where she hoped Marilyn and Joe would visit. The letter was
friendly and informal; and as a result any thoughts Marilyn may have had that Kay blamed her for Gable’s death were finally dispelled.

  In need of a break, Marilyn travelled to Los Angeles in April where she enjoyed going on dates and lying on her private patio at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She even took time to speak with Hedda Hopper about the Rain project, explaining, ‘I’ve been looking forward to doing ‘Rain’ on TV for a long time. We expect to have Fredric March and Florence Eldredge playing the Rev Davidson and his wife.’ However, it didn’t all go to plan. Firstly, Marilyn began to learn that the stalled negotiations for Rain were forcing co-stars to pull out of the project, and then she was admitted to hospital for a minor gynaecological operation on 24 May. Marilyn later told her half-sister, Berniece, that during her time in the facility her father, Stanley Gifford, arrived to visit her. They sat for some time talking, though she felt the meeting lacked the affection she had always craved and found the whole episode extremely hard to process.

  If this meeting took place, Gifford never publicly talked about it, not even to his son, Charles Stanley Gifford Jr, who always had a very hard time believing that Gifford Sr could be the father of Marilyn Monroe. During a 2001 conversation between Gifford Jr and Mary Sims, president of the ‘Immortal Marilyn’ fan club, Mary expressed how proud he must be that his father was believed to be Marilyn Monroe’s father too. ‘Proud of what?’ Gifford Jr asked, ‘That he walked out on Norma Jeane and never acknowledged her or admitted he was her father?’

  ‘I got the distinct feeling that his concern was the perception that his father didn’t do right by Norma Jeane, and the disgrace that comes down on the family name because of it,’ remembered Sims. ‘I said he wouldn’t be the first man to have done that in history; he agreed, and then we both said at the same time “That’s life.”’

  Declaring to Earl Wilson, ‘I like my freedom; I like to play the field,’ Marilyn lost weight, cut her hair short and bought a wardrobe full of new clothes. ‘I’m very glad to be free again; this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time,’ she told Hedda Hopper. She also upped her social life, too: meeting poet and idol, Carl Sandburg; travelling to Palm Springs (where she spent time with Sinatra); then dashing to Las Vegas to see him perform with Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr at the Sands Hotel.