Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Marilyn didn’t see many old friends after she returned to New York from Reno. When Norman Rosten called, she often didn’t pick up the phone, and when she did she sounded depressed, with her voice slurred by drugs. The Strasbergs were the only people she allowed to visit her. But she no longer went to their apartment in the middle of the night for solace, as she once had. She often talked about suicide. She contemplated jumping out of a window of her thirteenth-floor apartment. Pat Newcomb took her to ride the Staten Island ferry, and Marilyn stared into the water as though she were thinking of jumping.

  On January 14, 1961, Aaron Frosch, her new lawyer, drew up a new will and rushed her to New Jersey to sign it, with Pat Newcomb accompanying them. Fearful that Marilyn might kill herself, they wanted to remove Arthur Miller as its beneficiary. In the new version Marilyn left most of her money to Lee Strasberg, with bequests to Marianne Kris, a small trust for her mother, and gifts of money to Xenia Chekhov and for Patricia Rosten for college. Frosch was Paula Strasberg’s lawyer; Marilyn had found him through Paula. Inez Melson, among others, thought that undue pressure had been placed on Marilyn to sign this will. If so—and the charge has never been proven—the Strasbergs may have colluded with Frosch to obtain such a bequest.

  On January 20, the day of the inauguration, Marilyn went to Juarez, Mexico, along with Pat Newcomb and Aaron Frosch, to secure a quick divorce. The idea was Pat’s. With public attention on the inauguration, the hope was that Marilyn’s divorce action might be overlooked. It also kept her away from the inauguration, where a lot of her friends, like Frank Sinatra, were performing, and where Kennedy would firm up his relationship with film star Angie Dickinson. After the divorce, she seemed fine for a while. She went to the preview of The Misfits with Montgomery Clift on January 31—it was rushed through production to qualify for the 1961 Oscars and to capitalize on Gable’s death. The reception of The Misfits was mixed: critics found its perspective arcane, more European than American. Marilyn thought it had problems, although she told Ralph Roberts she thought that it would eventually become a classic.

  But she kept spinning downward. She retreated into her bedroom, which she kept hot and dark, with blackout blinds over the windows, as she had during the last weeks in Reno. The Shaws and the Rostens had never seen her so depressed. Marianne Kris decided that something drastic had to be done. She persuaded Marilyn to enter a hospital for drug withdrawal. Marilyn had often been hospitalized—for gynecological surgery, for rest when she was worn out, for drug addiction—but this one was different. In what Kris later said was a mistake, she had Marilyn admitted to the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York–Presbyterian Hospital. It turned out to be a place for psychotic patients, with bars on windows, locks on doors, and windows in the doors so that patients could be observed at all times. Marilyn was now in an institution like the ones in which her mother had lived.

  Once admitted, she wasn’t treated well. At first she was simply abandoned, with no one visiting her. Yelling brought no results. “The furies came and went,” she told Ralph Roberts. Remembering her neurotic behavior in Don’t Bother to Knock, she smashed the window on the bathroom door and threatened to cut her wrists with a shard of glass. Nurses and attendants now appeared. She only wanted to attract someone’s attention so that she could explain she was in the wrong hospital, but they wouldn’t listen to her. Instead, she was restrained and threatened with a straitjacket. Four burly male attendants carried her, facedown, to the ward for violent cases, where she was placed in another cell. She managed to get hold of pencil and paper and to smuggle out a note to the Strasbergs, but they didn’t appear. They said the hospital wouldn’t let them see Marilyn because they weren’t members of her family. Marianne Kris also didn’t appear, although she had promised to go every day.52

  In Marilyn’s memory of the experience, it became even more horrible. She told Gloria Romanoff she had been sedated and constrained so that she couldn’t move. She’d been forced to put on a hospital gown, and the doctors and nurses, fascinated by her body, had entered her room and checked it out. Some of them, she said, were lesbians. You can’t imagine the horror, she said.53

  Joe DiMaggio was her savior. She secured a dime and telephoned him in Florida, where he was with the Yankees in spring training. He immediately flew to New York and went to the hospital. He threatened to tear the building apart brick by brick if they didn’t let Marilyn out. They released her, and he and Pat Newcomb took her to Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center, where she was admitted for rest and drug-withdrawal treatment.

  The Payne Whitney episode was a decisive experience in Marilyn’s life. She didn’t want to continue therapy with Marianne Kris, but she couldn’t find another therapist in New York whom she liked. She’d maintained contact with Ralph Greenson after she’d seen him on an emergency basis during Let’s Make Love and The Misfits, and she wrote him a long letter from Columbia Presbyterian about the terrible experience in Payne Whitney. In a postscript she told him that she’d had a “fling on the wing” with someone he’d always frowned upon. She was referring either to Jack Kennedy or to Frank Sinatra.

  After a restorative two-week vacation with Joe DiMaggio in Florida, she decided to move to Los Angeles to undergo regular therapy with Ralph Greenson.54 She would continue seeing Joe DiMaggio as a close friend and sometime lover. She was fascinated by Frank Sinatra, and she had already become close to Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy Lawford. Their house on the beach was a place that Jack Kennedy visited, using it as a “Western White House” once he became president in January 1961. The West Coast was beckoning to her. By midsummer 1961 she would establish her base of operations in Hollywood.

  Part V

  Return to Hollywood, 1961–1962

  I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

  What hours, O what black hours we have spent.

  This night! …

  I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

  Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me …

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark”

  (a favorite poem of Marilyn’s)

  Chapter 12

  Denouement, 1961–1962

  In June 1961 British photographer Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer on The Prince and the Showgirl, visited Marilyn at her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she was staying. They had become friends during the London filming. He found her grief-stricken, upset over “an avalanche of problems,” including her divorce from Arthur Miller and the death of Clark Gable. She told him what had happened at Payne Whitney, her voice rising hysterically. “Was I a nut, after all? There’s my mother, paranoid schizophrenic, and her family, all destroyed by insanity.” Then her mood shifted, and she seemed angry: “I’ve been used by so many people,” she cried. “I was abandoned at the beginning, and I’m still being abandoned.” She told him that she didn’t want to play her “dumb-blonde” character anymore. She spoke about her many selves, but she seemed confused about who she wanted to be.

  A lot of people like to think of me as innocent, so that’s the way I behave to them. If they saw the demon in me, they would hate me … I’m more than one person, and I act differently each time. Most of the time I’m not the person I’d like to be—certainly not a dumb blonde like they say I am; a sex freak with big boobs.

  She began sobbing, and Cardiff took her in his arms and held her, as though she were a child.1 By the time he left, Marilyn had calmed down, but the incident foreshadowed Marilyn’s volatile state of mind in the ensuing months.

  Marilyn was already deep into therapy with Ralph Greenson, seeing him as often as five times a week He thought she was improving, since she seemed more positive in her outlook and Hyman Engelberg told him she was taking almost no prescription drugs.2 On June 1, her birthday, she sent Greenson a telegram: “In this world of people I’m glad there’s you.” According to friends, she called him Jesus. As she had with Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg, she was developing
a father-savior complex with him. During the next year their relationship would become a focal point in her life.

  While coping with serious depression, she saw close friends, gave occasional interviews, and consulted her agent and lawyers, as they negotiated with Twentieth Century–Fox over what films she would make. On June 12, she went to the christening of Clark Gable’s son, John Clark, who had been born four months after his father’s death. Kay Gable greeted her warmly, inviting her to visit them and bring Joe DiMaggio along. At the end of June, she flew to New York and drove with Ralph Roberts to the Roxbury house to pick up possessions of hers that she had left there. She told Roberts of her love for the house and her sorrow at having to give it up. She reminisced: “It had been such heaven buying it, repairing it. Planting. Dreaming. Hoping.”

  She was upset to see signs of a woman living in the house and especially to find several volumes of Inge Morath’s photos next to her gardening books. She must have known that Arthur was involved with Inge; Gussie Miller had died at the end of March, and Inge had been with Arthur at the funeral, which Marilyn attended. Yet the reality that Inge may have been living with Arthur in the Roxbury house bothered her. She was certain he’d placed the photography books on the shelf next to her gardening books on purpose; he knew she would retrieve those books when she went to the house to get her possessions. It was just like London, she said, when he had left his journal open to the entry about how she had disappointed him. Arthur knows how to hurt, she said. She threw Inge’s books into the garbage.3

  In late June she had an acute attack of pain in her side. In two hours of surgery at Polyclinic Hospital in New York, her diseased gallbladder was removed. The hospital took elaborate precautions to protect her privacy, hiring Pinkerton guards to patrol all corridors and building a special elevator in the rear of the building. When she left the hospital, so many people jammed the parking lot that it took an hour for her to get to her waiting limousine. Marilyn’s magic was still there. Berniece Miracle stayed with her in her Manhattan apartment as she recuperated, and she became concerned about the number of prescription drug pills Marilyn was taking.4 Joe DiMaggio was often at her apartment during her recuperation, frequently having dinner there, along with his friend George Solotaire. He had made his peace with Marilyn’s behavior years earlier.

  Marilyn still refused to marry him, despite his heroic rescue of her from Payne Whitney and their vacation together in Florida. They were spiritual friends—and occasional lovers. He telephoned her often and sent her roses. He was still traveling the world, visiting army bases with the Monette Company, but he was periodically in New York and Los Angeles and he saw her then. He remained deeply loyal to her, still obsessed with her. In early October 1961, when she was living in Los Angeles, he asked her to go to New York to attend the opening game of the World Series, where he was slated to throw the first pitch. It was a considerable honor; only U.S. presidents had previously thrown the first pitch. When she turned down the invitation, he wasn’t upset. He told her to watch him on television as he threw the ball and he’d make a sign only she would understand.5

  She was seeing Frank Sinatra, who pursued her after they had connected in New York in December 1960. He was jokey and playful, different from Joe and Arthur, both of whom could be stolid and withdrawn. He took a strong stand on civil rights, and she liked that. She’d listened to his songs for years—at home, in her dressing room, in her automobile—and that made her feel close to him. He was a balladeer and a crooner who sang in a melancholy, haunting manner about the difficulties of love and the loneliness of night. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald had been vocal models for him, as they had been for Marilyn. In a phrase that resonated with her, his singing was sometimes called “suicide music.” He was intelligent; according to his daughter Nancy, he read all the time, history and biography mainly and everything published on Abraham Lincoln.6

  She didn’t travel by train with him across the country to Florida, as he’d proposed. Perhaps she saw him when she was in Florida with Joe DiMaggio; journalists speculated they were together there. Later that spring she visited him at his Palm Springs home, and she was his date for several of his Las Vegas openings. Louella Parsons declared that Marilyn had a “schoolgirl crush” on Frank. When I asked Jeanne Martin, Dean Martin’s wife, why Marilyn and Frank were together, she told me they both loved sex and were highly skilled at it.7

  Her relationship with Sinatra, like many of her friendships, wasn’t simple. At times he seemed committed to her, as when he gave her expensive emerald earrings to go with a favorite green dress. But he often ordered her around and she obeyed him. Dating him, she met Hollywood social leaders like the Gary Coopers and William and Edie Goetz. (Edie was the daughter of Louis B. Mayer.)8 They liked Frank because of his savoir-faire and his immense reputation as a singer and actor. He had vied with Clark Gable for the title “King of Hollywood,” but after Gable died the throne was his. Very ambitious, he liked socializing with the Hollywood A-list.

  Marilyn also joined other circles of his, including the Rat Pack, a male group composed of Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Joey Bishop. Frank had brought the group together in January 1960 in Las Vegas to make the movie Ocean’s Eleven, the story of five World War Two buddies who rob all the Las Vegas casinos. It presented men as pleasure-loving playboys in contrast to the heroes they had been in World War Two. Davis, Martin, and Bishop were wellknown comedians and singers. Lawford was known for his elegant English style. That he was married to Jack Kennedy’s sister Patricia mattered to Frank, who treasured his friendship with the Kennedys as a measure of success and had campaigned actively for Jack Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. Marilyn was already friends with Lawford and Davis, and she knew the others from her years in Hollywood.9

  The Rat Pack could be viewed as reflecting the disillusioned beat poets of the 1950s; as a forerunner to the youth rebellion of the ’60s; or as a group of middle-aged men stuck in adolescence. It was an outgrowth of an earlier “rat pack,” a nonconformist, heavy-drinking Hollywood clique led by Humphrey Bogart. Lauren Bacall, Bogart’s wife, had given them their name when they arrived at the Bogart house disheveled after a night of partying. “You look like a pack of rats,” she said to them.

  Bogart and his group partied in private, while Sinatra’s group clowned on stage during nightclub acts, using a language they invented that combined surfer talk, gangster patois, and Damon Runyon’s Broadway vernacular. (Frank had starred in the film version of Guys and Dolls, which was based on two short stories by Runyon.) Their humor revolved around drinking liquor or making jokes about Davis’s skin color and about women and their anatomy that drew from old strains of racism and sexism in American entertainment. Their acts also contained a lot of high school outhouse humor.10

  Frank introduced Marilyn to Las Vegas night life, which centered around drinking, gambling, and fornicating. Mia Farrow, married to Frank for a time, described the women around Sinatra as appendages of the men: they sat quietly while the men talked, sipped white wine, and laughed at the men’s jokes.11 It’s difficult to visualize Marilyn acting so subserviently, but she had the habit of turning herself into what her companion wanted her to be. In this case the male mythos of the Rat Pack drew from the James Bond mystique whereby highly masculine men casually bed beautiful women. In many ways she was retreating into the party-girl behavior of her early years in Hollywood.

  Surely Sinatra realized that introducing Marilyn to Las Vegas nightlife wasn’t helpful to her attempt to end her drug habit. He’d kicked alcohol and drugs, and perhaps he thought his example was enough to inspire her to change. Surely Marilyn knew that the compulsive, highly organized Sinatra looked askance at people who used drugs or drank too much in his presence. Sometimes she seemed to taunt him. She spent the month of August 1961 living in his house. One day he had a lunch date with Jack Kennedy at Peter Lawford’s house. She suddenly disappeared, forcing him to spend the day looking for her. He missed the l
unch.12

  Later that month, she was supposed to go with him on his yacht to Catalina, along with a number of his close friends. Everyone met at the boat, which was moored in Newport Harbor, but Marilyn didn’t appear. Jeanne Martin was deputized to get her from Frank’s house, miles away in Beverly Hills. Jeanne found her sitting in front of a mirror, staring at herself. Jeanne got her dressed and to the boat, but Marilyn was so spacy from drugs that Frank was afraid she’d fall overboard if they put to sea. The boat never left the harbor. They talked, drank, played cards, and slept on the moored boat. In the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, Marilyn knocked on cabin doors, looking for pills. She couldn’t seem to get enough.13

  Frank must have forgiven her for that episode, because several weeks later he took her to an elite party at Romanoff’s in honor of Billy Wilder and he gave her the emerald earrings. What happened there is quintessential Marilyn. She fascinated the guests with her wit and sparkling demeanor. By the end of the evening, the elite women stood in a row, as Marilyn taught them how to do her sexy walk. She was “roaring with laughter as she led them in the line.”14 Sinatra made it clear, however, that he didn’t like her habits of going nude in his house and of telling stories about her childhood. When he chided her about the stories, she was furious, before deciding he was perhaps right. Did his criticisms further her self-awareness, or did she accept them because Sinatra represented a powerful male force in her life? Was Sinatra helping her or magnifying her already broken self-confidence? Some say that when Sinatra went to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the end of the month to visit the Kennedy compound, she went with him, although the evidence isn’t conclusive.