Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The chaos continued, with reversal following comic reversal: Hollywood sometimes resembles its own best silent two-reel comedies.

  First, Fox’s board assigned two outside financial experts, John Loeb and Milton Gould, to investigate the company’s problems. According to Gould, they traveled from New York to Hollywood, found the studio “in a shambles, and immediately got Goldstein dismissed.” Although he admitted that he had absolutely no expertise in the business of moviemaking (“My job was to stop the mismanagement of money”), Gould replaced Goldstein with a new executive vice-president in charge of production.

  This new man was Peter G. Levathes, an intelligent and sophisticated attorney, once a Skouras assistant and then, after the war, head of the television department at Young & Rubicam advertising agency in New York. Unaccustomed to the techniques, traditions, demands, details and temperaments of film studio productions, Levathes was an energetic and benevolent man, but perhaps not the wisest choice to head a studio with a twenty-two-million-dollar debt. He was, according to director Jean Negulesco, “a tall, dark man, nervous and with the far-away look of a man with responsibilities beyond his understanding or ability.”

  By this time, David Brown was at work on Marilyn’s new picture, for which he had brought in writer Arnold Shulman to work on a revision of the popular 1940 comedy My Favorite Wife, which had starred Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. In the new version, Marilyn (as Ellen Arden), married and the mother of two babies, is seduced by the boss of her husband, Nick, a swiftly rising young businessman. Failing this rather sordid little “fidelity test,” she believes she has ruined Nick’s chances for success, and, humiliated, she flees to Hawaii and the Far East. But Ellen misses the connecting flight from Honolulu to Japan—a lucky mistake, for that airplane goes down in the Pacific. She is reported dead but remains in Hawaii for five years, until longing for her children and the collapse of an affair encourage her to return home. But at this very time, Nick has had her declared legally dead and has just remarried.4

  From the start, Marilyn did not want to do this picture, “but Dr. Greenson said it would be good for me,” as she reported to Ralph Roberts. Brown, borrowing a song from a Fred Astaire film, quickly settled on the film’s title: Something’s Got to Give. In addition, he engaged George Cukor, who also owed Fox a picture; despite the manifold problems on Let’s Make Love, Marilyn and George had parted as friends and she approved the choice of him. But very soon Cukor saw danger signals.

  First of all, the scenario was an almost insurmountable challenge, both in construction and character credibility: how, for example, could the comic, the sexual and the sentimental aspects of this story be updated and balanced? As autumn passed, even a sharp and witty writer like Shulman was stymied—by the project as well as by the accumulation of corporate problems at Fox. “There was nothing they could do right with this thing from the start,” Shulman recalled years later, adding that it was clear to him (as it was also to David Brown and others) that both the film and Marilyn were to be the targets of blame for an increasing series of management blunders. That winter, Shulman was succeeded by Nunnally Johnson, who had written and produced We’re Not Married and How To Marry a Millionaire.

  “Have you been trapped into this, too?” Marilyn asked Johnson when they met for a script conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As they discussed the problems with the scenario, he found that she was “quick, she was gay, she probed into certain aspects of the story with the sharpest perception.”

  At the same time, David Brown was replaced by an unlikely and yet, from one viewpoint, an entirely logical candidate. “Richard Zanuck called me one day,” Brown recalled, “and reported that he had just been in an elevator with a man who was carrying the script-in-progress for Something’s Got to Give. I’m worried,’ Dick said. I was, too.”

  Henry Weinstein, a New York producer of the Play of the Week television series and an associate producer for the Theatre Guild, had only recently been hired by Fox—“and Weinstein [thus David Brown] was the studio’s instrument to remove me as producer from Marilyn’s picture.” The decision was made unilaterally by Levathes, who cabled Spyros Skouras in New York on January 10: “The change will become effective this week as discreetly as possible.” Weinstein’s appointment to the job had also been championed by none other than Ralph Greenson, who was much admired by the young producer, who knew the psychiatrist socially. Reflecting after the fact, Levathes realized years later “how much Weinstein and Greenson seemed to need each other.”

  “Her therapist said it would be better if Marilyn had someone who understood her and could deal with her, so Henry got the job,” recalled David Brown. “His appointment made no one very happy. George Cukor, for example, threw an ink bottle at poor Henry on first meeting.” As for Greenson, he obtained for himself a position on the picture as special consultant and counselor to Marilyn Monroe—not for a large fee, but, to be sure, for a satisfying charge to his ego. This was the closest he came, after his dramatic lecture presentations onstage, to achieving relative stardom.

  Everything was spinning out of control, as Nunnally Johnson recalled: “there was no one at the studio with the strength or intelligence to call a halt to this idiocy.” While he wrote and preproduction began on Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn turned to the occupation that so often encouraged her: studio photography. Twenty-seven-year-old Douglas Kirkland, then a bright young photographer who would soon be established as one of the finest in his profession, was on the staff of Look magazine, then preparing a special quarter-century issue. Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Shirley MacLaine had been photographed, and Marilyn agreed to a session in November.

  Douglas Kirkland met Marilyn Monroe three times and, as he recalled years later, he saw “essentially a different person each time I met her.” First, he and two colleagues met Marilyn at her apartment. “She seemed,” he recalled, “to be paranoid about her privacy, and we were all made to vow we would never divulge where she lived.” Apart from that, he found a cheerful, easygoing woman with no star complex, speaking animatedly and eager to cooperate with the project.

  Their next meeting, two days later, was for the shooting session at a photographer’s studio, which began at nine in the evening. Kirkland vividly recalled that she seemed “very white, almost luminescent—this white vision drifted as if in slow motion into the studio. She seemed to give off a glow.” As they had agreed, Marilyn slipped into a bed with silk sheets, then discarded her robe and, from above, Kirkland began to take his pictures. But then she said, “Let’s stop for a minute,” and, turning to the crew—several assistants to herself and Kirkland and some people from Look—she said, “I want everybody to leave. I think I should be alone with this boy. I find it works better that way.”

  There was, as he remembered, an extraordinary sexual tension in the room. Kirkland snapped his photos, Marilyn seduced the camera, turned, sat forward, leaned backward. And then she asked him to come down from the gallery above and to sit on the bed with her. Kirkland, married and father of two, continued to work “even while she was teasing, toying with me, making it very clear what she meant and what she was offering.” After the last photo, he shared a glass of champagne with her, and their colleagues rejoined them.

  “This glowing-white woman in white silk sheets had enjoyed playing this game,” recalled Kirkland, “and even though nothing happened between us, for her something had.” It was just as André de Dienes, Phillipe Halsman, Milton Greene and every photographer had learned: the camera lens was not an inert glass eye, but the eyes of millions. The ultimate sex object, she responded to its stimulative power, it aroused her, and—as the entire impact of her personality was directed at that lens—she ineluctably invited the man present and the men absent.

  Their third meeting took place back at Marilyn’s apartment two days later, when Kirkland returned with the proofs. She wore a scarf on her head, and dark glasses. Alone, she was irritable and aloof and, after some delays, selected ten image
s she approved; those she rejected she cut up with scissors. Of the one she most preferred, Marilyn said, “To me, this is the kind of girl a truck driver would like to be in there with, in those white sheets.” A certain blue-collar appeal, he sensed, was what Marilyn sought: the presentation of a woman for the average working man, not the aristocrat. “If I am a star,” she said soon after, “it was the people who made me one—not the studio, but the people.” From their last meeting, Kirkland kept forever the image of a troubled woman who was also a consummate professional.

  That Marilyn was alternately cheerful and troubled had a foundation Douglas Kirkland could not have known.

  Spending so many hours at the Greenson home on Franklin Street, Marilyn came to appreciate its Spanish colonial charm—the stucco walls, the balconies, the profusion of hand-painted Mexican tiles, the beamed cathedral-ceiling living room, the homey kitchen. At this house she dined often after her therapy; here she taught Joan to dance, and here she attended Greenson’s evening musicales. Her love for the house and her virtual part-time residence there led Greenson to suggest that Marilyn look to purchase a similar home of her own—nearby. To this idea she was lukewarm, as she was to the idea of the new Fox project. But by this time Greenson was making the decisions. “I encouraged her to buy the house,” he said later. “She said she had no interest in remaining in California or making it her residence. She said that after her next picture she would go back to New York, which she considered her permanent home.”

  But that statement he made in 1966. In 1961, the task of helping Marilyn find the right house fell to the woman who was engaged as her new companion, replacing in Marilyn’s life (so the doctor intended) the devoted Ralph Roberts.

  Greenson had told Marilyn to hire Eunice Murray, then fifty-nine, the same woman who had sold her home to him fourteen years before. “The doctor thought the house would take the place of a baby or a husband, and that it would protect her,” according to Eunice, who was perhaps unaware of the impudence and imprudence of such an idea. But this was not the worst of the matter. In Marilyn Monroe’s submission to Eunice Murray—there can be no other noun to describe their relationship—Ralph Greenson made perhaps the unwisest choice of his life. Even his wife (not to say every one of Marilyn’s friends and colleagues who subsequently met Eunice) described Eunice as one of the strangest creatures in their experience. But from the end of 1961, Marilyn spent very few nights without Eunice Murray nearby: when she had time off, Greenson brought Marilyn to live with his family again, because, he believed, “there was nobody else around whom I could trust.” This is among the oddest of Greenson’s odd remarks, but “there was nobody else” but Eunice who was so willing to do his bidding with regard to Marilyn Monroe.

  The second of two girls, Eunice Joerndt was born in Chicago in March 1902, and when she was very young, her parents—devout members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect—moved to rural Ohio. An outwardly docile and sweet child, Eunice attended country grade school and at fifteen she was sent off to the Urbana School and Academy (in Urbana, Ohio), an institution steeped in the tradition of the Swedenborgian religion. Here her sister Carolyn, four years older than Eunice, was already residing. The following year, the school roster lists Los Angeles as Eunice’s home address and Chicago as Carolyn’s.

  This discrepancy is easily explained. Contacted at their new home in Los Angeles, the parents were told that Carolyn was ill with Spanish influenza and had been put under a physician’s care. Enraged at this flagrant defiance of their religious prohibition against medical care, the Joerndts legally disowned Carolyn, who thenceforth ceased to exist for them. When this unhappy news arrived, a school house-mother temporarily looked after Carolyn.

  Eunice escaped the flu and virtual orphanhood. But she adored her sister, considering herself (as she said) Carolyn’s “mere shadow.” She was also deeply affected by her parents’ violent reaction, and from this time, and with good reason, she began to suffer subtle but distinct signs of emotional disturbance—primarily an inability to differentiate her life from that of her sister’s and other contemporaries, and an almost paralyzing terror of being abandoned. Her formal education ended in 1918, before her sixteenth birthday, apparently because of her emotional and psychological frailty.

  The influence of the Swedenborgian religion on the Joerndt girls at Urbana Academy cannot be overestimated. Urged to imitate their founder (the eighteenth-century Swedish scholar, scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg), the forty students were urged “constantly to engage in thought about God, salvation and the spiritual diseases of men” while undergoing “instruction in arts and morals.” Set before them as the sublimest goal was marriage, which they believed continued in eternity.

  The sisters’ close alliance persisted, and in early 1924 they both announced their engagements. Grateful for the benevolence offered by the Urbana community and devoted to the principles of Swedenborgianism, Carolyn married Franklin Blackmer, a prominent Swedenborgian minister who served for six years as president of Urbana College. Carolyn herself had taught there from 1921 to her wedding day, and she was a powerful force in the college’s life until her death in 1972—despite the retirement of her husband, a “controversial, alienating man,” as the college’s historian candidly described him.

  Continuing to identify with her sister, who that year married Reverend Blackmer, Eunice married John Murray, a World War veteran and the son of an equally prominent Swedenborgian minister named Walter Brown Murray. John planned to enter the ministry too, and to that end he attended the Yale Divinity School. But he quit the seminary, was never ordained and turned instead to his first love, carpentry, which Eunice took for an imitation of the Lord Jesus Himself. John Murray eventually rose to become vice-president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

  Carolyn Joerndt Blackmer devoted her entire life to Swedenborgianism, Urbana, her husband and the little nursery school she opened on campus in 1929, which expressed her love of children and her desire for good early education. By that time, Eunice and John were beginning their own family and eventually had three daughters, named Jacquelyn, Patricia and Marilyn. Although Eunice’s lack of education prevented her from becoming a teacher, she imitated further her adored sister, even to the point of calling herself a “child nurse” or even, more boldly, a “nurse”—a designation she continued to assume during her later life in Los Angeles, where she listed herself in telephone directories as an educated, trained professional (indeed, a “shadow” of Carolyn). Lacking any training or credentials other than the normal school of motherhood, Eunice throughout her life admired her sister Carolyn and her brother-in-law Franklin Blackmer to the point of idolatry; indeed, after the death of Carolyn she married Franklin, who died within the year. Eunice Joerndt Murray Blackmer’s life, it appears, might have served as the true-life basis of a minor nineteenth-century Gothic romance.

  Eunice and John Murray’s marriage was frankly troubled almost from the outset. He traveled round the country and into Mexico, organizing trade unions and leaving his wife to raise their daughters. They lived at various addresses in Los Angeles and during World War II (in which John was too old to serve) they resided on busy Twenty-sixth Street in Santa Monica. At the same time, they began to build a five-bedroom Monterey hacienda on nearby Franklin Street—a house they had planned for years, according to Eunice’s later memoir. The home was completed in 1946, but by that time John Murray was virtually an absentee father, and Eunice had no money for the mortgage. This was a grave disappointment for her, and she sold the home to Ralph Greenson after inhabiting it only four months; to maintain a connection to the house, she befriended the buyers and even asked if she might work for the doctor.

  Almost at once, he hired her, putting her in the homes of his most important clients as monitor, companion and nursemaid, a position for which she had no training or special capability; she did, however (as Greenson required), obediently report to him every detail of his clients’ private lives. “It wa
s strictly a financial relationship,” said Eunice’s son-in-law Philip Laclair, who married her daughter Marilyn.

  She did it for the money. Her husband [John Murray] left her badly, she had no formal training as a nurse—not even a high school education—but she was a kind woman and became a valuable asset to Greenson. She always followed his orders very closely.

  In 1950, after more than a decade of long separations, the Murrays were at last divorced—a moment that perhaps made Eunice feel more than ever a failure, for in terminating a marriage she failed to live out one of Swedenborgianism’s essential tenets; she had also failed in her emulation of Carolyn. (John Murray subsequently remarried, moved to New Mexico, and died in 1958.) From 1950, Eunice was a lonely woman looking for purpose and comfort, and this she found in her work for Ralph Greenson. Eager to serve a man of authority who was both father figure and carer of souls, Eunice was sent by him to work (as she said) “in any kind of therapy that seemed indicated,” either with clients “seriously ill with depression or schizophrenia, [or with] others, like Marilyn Monroe, [who] were simply recovering from stressful experiences and needed supportive aid.”

  With her famous client Marilyn Monroe, who also bore the name of her youngest daughter, it would have been natural for Eunice to sense a younger version of herself—a shy, confused soul abandoned by her parents, denied education and victimized by unhappy marriages. Here Eunice (by 1961 a grandmother) had an opportunity to revise her own earlier life, to correct what had gone wrong—with the help of the common denominator she shared with Marilyn: Ralph Greenson. From the first day of their meeting at Doheny Drive in 1961, she regarded Marilyn as a recalcitrant child—so Greenson also described her—and as Marilyn’s friends soon recognized, Eunice treated her with a certain benign condescension, indicating in her sweet, quiet manner where they should shop and how they should arrange their schedule around Marilyn’s daily sessions with Greenson. And Marilyn, accustomed to accepting her doctor’s decisions, offered no resistance—for the present. But very soon, as everyone recognized, Marilyn resented Eunice’s prying and her obvious function as the doctor’s “plant.”