Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  The Poucette painting expressed her rage. The bull might be seen as representing the monster inside her created by her absent father and mother; by the man who molested her as a child and by the Hollywood men who used her. It symbolized major issues in her life. Could she find her way past the black bull of the painting to the enchanted city at its top? Or were the forms in the red mist dead people, ghosts from the cemetery in her dream? Did they represent the fetuses she had aborted, the miscarriages visited on her? Had she been damned by God because as a child she had committed an unpardonable sin?

  Marilyn returned to Hollywood from the Kennedy birthday celebration on Sunday, May 20, in a triumphant mood. She had captured the nation’s attention in a spectacular way. She was determined to finish Something’s Got to Give and to counter the negative publicity she was receiving. She would show the world she was still desirable at the age of thirty-five. Three days later, on May 23, she did a swimming pool scene for the movie and slipped off her bathing suit to appear in the nude. It was a daring gesture, carrying her near-nudity at the Kennedy birthday celebration to an extreme. Elizabeth Taylor, who had become Marilyn’s nemesis while making Cleopatra in Rome during these months, had done a titillating partly nude bath scene, photos of which had been featured in newspapers. But the line of the nude bodysuit she was wearing showed in the photographs. Marilyn’s obvious nudity was more daring.

  Marilyn had been on a high-protein, low-starch diet ever since her gallbladder surgery a year earlier, and she had lost a lot of weight. She was now thin and svelte. She dog-paddled in the nude swimming scene and then did a striptease flash while donning a robe. Newspapers went wild over her daring. Lawrence Schiller, a young photographer, took some of the photographs. According to him, they resulted from a conversation Pat Newcomb, Marilyn, and he had had about how to replace Elizabeth Taylor with Marilyn on magazine covers. They came up with the nudity in the swimming scene. Pat didn’t want her to do it, but Marilyn insisted. Schiller then realized she was a shrewd businesswoman who knew how to market herself. The rest of the week she appeared on the set, ready for filming.3

  The next Monday, May 28, her high fever returned, but she managed to rally and work through Friday. Yet by then, no matter what she did, Cukor and Levathes were furious with her. She had missed the first two weeks of filming and had gone to the Kennedy birthday celebration against their wishes. In addition, Cukor reported that Marilyn’s acting was below par, although he may have concealed the truth. He and Levathes didn’t notice that in the ten days she reported for shooting, most of her scenes for the film had been shot.

  A new Marilyn was emerging in Something’s Got to Give, but Cukor and the Fox executives were too angry at her to notice. She plays Ellen Arden in the film, in her thirties, the mother of two children. She does a brilliant comic turn as a woman returning to a newly remarried husband after five years on an island with another man, but she is also mature and dignified. She resembles Grace Kelly as much as the sexy Marilyn. The new persona is evident in takes from the film that were reedited into a final product years later by several filmmakers who found them in Fox storage vaults.4 Shades of the mature Marilyn had been evident in Roslyn in The Misfits; both Roslyn and Ellen reflect the depth Marilyn brought to her acting in 1959 at the Actors Studio, when she played Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She was becoming the dramatic actress she had wanted to be.

  June 1 was her birthday. Studios gave major stars elaborate birthday parties if they were filming, but Fox paid no attention to Marilyn this year. Cleopatra was bankrupting the studio. They had put up with Elizabeth Taylor’s bad behavior, and they feared that Marilyn would create similar financial overruns. In their minds Taylor was a golden girl, who had begun acting at MGM as a child, enchanting them all, while Marilyn was a studio slut who had fought them at every turn in her career. They detested Paula Strasberg, who was once again coaching Marilyn. Marilyn’s standin bought a cake for the birthday and a bottle of champagne. Once filming ended that day, the cast and crew sang “Happy Birthday to you,” and Marilyn cut the cake. Neither Cukor nor any of the Fox executives attended. It was a serious slight.

  That evening Marilyn threw out the first pitch at the Los Angeles Angels baseball game, which was a benefit for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The night was cold and misty. By the time she went home, her temperature was high and she had chills and a fever. The next day she broke down. She called Greenson’s house, and his children went to her home. They found her huddling in her bed in her darkened bedroom, barely coherent as she poured out a list of woes: she was ugly and unloved; she had been badly used; her life wasn’t worth living. They called Milton Wexler, Greenson’s associate, and he went to see her. He threw away the many prescription bottles on her bedside table and left. Pat Newcomb then arrived with prescription drugs she had and drugged Marilyn for several days, sleeping at the foot of the bed. Eunice left food outside the bedroom door for them.5

  What had happened? Why had Marilyn crashed on May 28 and on June 2? Negative turns in her relationships with the Kennedys played a major role. That spring, in her last interview with W. J. Weatherby, she stated that she was meeting a famous politician in secret because he had a wife and children, but she might marry him. The gossip among journalists was rife with stories about Marilyn and the Kennedys; Weatherby surmised it was one of them. He worried about her when they would invariably break with her; both were too dedicated to politics and to their families to stay with her.6

  He was right to worry. On May 24, several days after her return to Hollywood from the birthday celebration, her access to the White House phone line was cut off. Peter Lawford informed her that the president would no longer see her. According to Patricia Lawford Stewart, Jack Kennedy wasn’t kind in breaking with her. “There was no effort to let her down easily. She was told that she could never speak to the president again, that she wouldn’t be first lady, that she wasn’t even a serious affair to Jack. ‘Look, Marilyn,’ Peter said, ‘You’ve just been another one of Jack’s fucks.’ “7

  On one of those weekends she talked to Frank Sinatra, whom she had been trying to reach for days. He was bitter about the Kennedys, since they had cut off relations with him when J. Edgar Hoover told Bobby in February that the FBI had found out Sinatra was friendly with Sam Giancana. As attorney general, Bobby was crusading against the Mafia and Giancana, and no friend of his could be friends with a Mafia leader. Despite Sinatra’s work for Jack Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, he would no longer have access to the Kennedys. Given their rejection of Sinatra, Marilyn feared the Kennedys meant it when they cut her off. She had a terrible fear of abandonment, and this was a major one.

  On top of the Kennedy issue, Marilyn had to deal with Fox, which was threatening to fire her. Moreover, Cukor remained impossible as a director. He and Walter Bernstein continued to rewrite the dialogue in Something’s Got to Give and to send her corrections in the evenings, expecting her to have them memorized by the next morning, which was nearly impossible for her. Turning on her for demanding unnecessary retakes on Let’s Make Love, Cukor now ordered unnecessary retakes on Something’s Got to Give, which is apparent from the footage in the Fox archive.

  Marilyn had Eunice Murray call Greenson in Europe. Since the previous winter he had negotiated with the studio on her behalf. Many stars were now using lawyers as their agents, in order to save money, and Mickey Rudin, Greenson’s brother-in-law and a wellknown Hollywood lawyer, had taken over this role for Marilyn from Lew Wasserman and MCA, which would end its talent agency that summer to focus on film production. Greenson and Rudin were working together. The studio’s major concern was that Marilyn arrive at the set on time, and Greenson promised that Rudin, Weinstein, and he could get Marilyn to be prompt. Greenson arrived home from Europe on June 6, and he met with Mickey Rudin and Fox executives on Marilyn’s behalf. Yet despite his assurances that he could get Marilyn to do anything, the studio fired her on June 9.

  To cover their track
s, studio executives escalated their publicity campaign against her. She was irresponsible; she had been faking illness; she had caused the layoffs of more than one hundred workers when the picture was canceled. They even suggested that, like her mother, she was mentally imbalanced. According to Earl Wilson, she was taking thirty pills a day.8 Was Wilson correct? Throughout the summer Greenson contended that Marilyn was cutting back on pill taking, and both Lee Siegel and Hyman Engelberg claimed the shots they gave Marilyn were vitamin B12, not amphetamines. A B12 shot does produce energy, although not an immediate high.

  Marilyn retreated into her bedroom after the firing, but she quickly came back, displaying her characteristic pattern of retreating and then advancing in the face of disaster. Pat Newcomb and she orchestrated a campaign on her behalf. She appealed to the public; in fact, fan mail sent to the studio about the firing was in her favor. Toward the end of June she did photo sessions with Bert Stern and George Barris, and she dictated a brief autobiography to Barris. As the summer progressed, interviews with her appeared in Redbook and Life.

  The Stern session was a turning point. It was commissioned by Vogue, the world’s preeminent high-fashion magazine. Vogue had published scores of pictures of Audrey Hepburn over the years, but never any of Marilyn. Just the month before, Bert Stern had shot Elizabeth Taylor for Vogue, and Marilyn was following suit with something bolder. It was Stern’s idea to photograph her nude, with transparent chiffon scarves over her body, concealing and revealing it. They shot all night. The next day Stern was contacted to do fashion photos of her. He photographed her in an elegant black dress demonstrating that, with her thin body, she could model high-fashion clothes.9 Vogue followed the nude photo with the high-fashion photo.

  Both her anger and her rationality are on display in her Life magazine interview, published the week before her death. She chided the studio for the way they treated her: “I’m not in a military school. I’m there to give a performance and not to be disciplined by a studio. An actor is a sensitive instrument, not a machine.” She spoke of her shyness, her struggle with herself, her dislike of the “big American rush—you got to go fast for no good reason.” She didn’t want to be considered a commodity, a person selling a product. And on fame: “Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle.” She was angry at the studio for not preserving their history. “If you’ve noticed in Hollywood where millions and billions of dollars have been made, there aren’t really any kind of monuments or museums … Nobody left anything behind, they took it, they grabbed it, and they ran—the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers.” The Marilyn she portrayed in the Life interview was resilient and tough, although in the taped version of the interview, she has a nervous laugh that sounds as though something is bothering her.10

  Then she had a lucky break. The studio, furious with Marilyn over past sins in addition to present ones, wanted to replace her with Lee Remick in the role of Ellen Arden. But Dean Martin refused to do the movie without Marilyn. She next called Darryl Zanuck in Paris, having heard that he was going to execute a power play and take over as corporate head of Fox. He knew that Peter Levathes, associated with Skouras, was running the studio into the ground. Zanuck hadn’t liked Marilyn as an actress, but he was aware of her box office appeal, and money was his bottom line. It was her presence in the movie that would draw audiences. Zanuck, who had been her nemesis throughout much of her career, now became her savior. Within two weeks, she was negotiating with Fox to continue the film. They offered her one million dollars to complete Something’s Got to Give and to do a second movie. The deal included firing Paula Strasberg, whom they detested, as well as Pat Newcomb. They would return to Nunnally Johnson’s original script, which Marilyn had liked, and replace George Cukor with Jean Negulesco, Marilyn’s friend.

  Bobby Kennedy was in Los Angeles several times that spring and summer. He was visiting the local office of the Department of Justice and also was talking to producer Jerry Wald about making a movie out of his book The Enemy Within, the story of his investigation of Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union. Wald died in the middle of the summer, however, and the movie was never made.11

  On June 26, 1962, Marilyn attended a party at the Lawford beach house at which Bobby was present. There had already been sightings of them together. Reporter James Bacon stated their relationship was longlasting but she never talked about it. Rupert Allan said she had deluded herself into believing that Bobby would marry her. Jeanne Martin was aware of it, as were Anne Karger; Henry Weinstein; Natalie Trundy and Arthur Jacobs; George Chasin (Marilyn’s agent at MCA); Phyllis McGuire, Sam Giancana’s girlfriend; Janet Des Rosiers, a longtime lover of Joe Kennedy; and Lady May Lawford, Peter Lawford’s mother. Lawford neighbors Peter Dye, Lynn Sherman, and Ward Wood knew about it, as did Peter Lawford’s close friends Molly Dunne, George “Bullets” Durgom, and Milton Ebbins. At the time Marilyn died, Earl Wilson stated she was involved only with Jack Kennedy, but in 1976, in his biography of Sinatra, he wrote, “I couldn’t expose Jack and Bobby’s sharing of Marilyn Monroe and other girls in my previous work. Now I can expose it.” By 1976 both Jack and Bobby had been assassinated.12

  Harry Hall, a close friend of Joe DiMaggio’s who was both a “wise guy” and an FBI informant, said Marilyn often broke dates with DiMaggio the year before she died to see Bobby Kennedy. (DiMaggio was still having her followed.) Michael Selsman, the third agent in the Arthur Jacobs firm, was assigned to persuade newspapers to pull stories on her meetings with Bobby. Joan Greenson said she was dating “the General”—a title Bobby’s office staff had given him because he could be stern. On Friday, August 3, two days before Marilyn’s death, Dorothy Kilgallen hinted at the relationship in her column. Even John Bates, the owner of the ranch near Santa Cruz where Bobby said he spent the weekend of Marilyn’s death, stated that everyone knew they were close friends. Marilyn told some of her friends that Bobby was too puny for her, but Peter Lawford wrote in manuscript notes for his unpublished autobiography that she was mesmerized by Bobby’s intellect. In 1992, when Ted Landreth of the BBC produced a documentary on Marilyn’s death, he polled the members of the Washington Press Corps who had been reporters during the Kennedy administration asking them if they had known about Marilyn’s involvement with both Kennedys. Most said they had.13

  There was also the note Jean Kennedy Smith wrote to Marilyn: “Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East!” The Kennedys claimed the statement was a joke—an unconvincing explanation. Inez Melson, guardian for Marilyn’s mother and executrix of Marilyn’s Los Angeles estate, found the note when she was cleaning out the Brentwood house after Marilyn died. She kept it. She said she intended to use it if Bobby ever ran for president to prove he was immoral.14 Inez had a strong sense of propriety. She knew about Marilyn and the Kennedys, and she didn’t like it.

  It was inevitable that Bobby would break with Marilyn. He was the most devoutly Catholic of the Kennedy brothers. He could be kind and loving, but he was ruthless at this point in his career. Considered the runt of the family because of his small size, he had kept up with the other brothers by sheer force of will. His wife, Ethel, bore many children and was a good Catholic girl. But she gave parties that defined Washington political society, was energetic and amusing, and was an excellent campaigner. She was valuable to Bobby, who loved her and their children.

  The previous December Joe Kennedy had had a major stroke, which incapacitated him permanently and rendered him unable to talk. Since Jack Kennedy was absorbed by the presidency and his physical issues, by 1962 Bobby was the de facto head of the family, responsible for covering up sexual improprieties. As attorney general he went after the Mafia. He didn’t seem to know—or he refused to admit—that his father had Mafia connections and that the mob had swung the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy through voter fraud. Robert Kennedy was a bundle of contradictions.

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sp; By mid-June, Marilyn seemed to have recovered from her virus. She spent time with Marlon Brando and his best friend, the intelligent and amusing Wally Cox, who played a supporting role in Something’s Got to Give. She often saw the Lawfords. They went to her house for drinks and snacks, and she stayed overnight in their house when she wanted company. Peter never forgot the night Marilyn went into their bedroom, unable to sleep, and expressed the wish that she could have a marriage as wonderful as theirs. The truth was their marriage was falling apart, but they put up a good front. When Eunice Murray was Marilyn’s assistant, she heard long, easygoing phone conversations between Marilyn and Pat Lawford.15

  Marilyn also went to Ralph Greenson’s musical evenings. She supervised revisions to her house and worked in her garden. Gloria Romanoff said she had never seen Marilyn so happy; she loved her house and loved to show it off. She liked having Eunice Murray around because she was never alone. She became close to Joan Greenson and gave her a surprise birthday party. She saw Ralph Greenson nearly every weekday for a therapy session.16

  But the rage was still inside her. Michael Selsman, the third agent in the Jacobs office, was assigned to do publicity for her and function as a liaison to her, in addition to Pat Newcomb. Whenever Selsman saw her, she seemed in a rage. He found her duplicitous and demanding, a terrible diva. But he was married to Carol Lynley, a rising blonde star at Fox who had the dressing room suite next to Marilyn’s. Lynley had everything Marilyn wanted—a loving husband, a reputation as a dramatic actress, and a baby—and she was challenging Marilyn’s position as Hollywood’s reigning blonde beauty. Lynley roused Marilyn’s fear of being taken over, and Marilyn took it out on her husband Michael, who was young and vulnerable. Moreover, private detective Fred Otash had bugged her house, and now his operatives listened to her phone calls. She had a lot of angry exchanges with both Jack and Bobby, especially with Bobby, who made dates with her and didn’t show up, citing career obligations. When she spoke with Jack Kennedy, he tried to calm her down, but Bobby was vituperative. Her anger against them was mounting; it showed in her exchanges with Selsman.17