Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The third and fourth meetings were the most casual of all: at the president’s birthday gala in New York on May 19 (among hundreds of other guests); and when Peter and Patricia Lawford invited Marilyn to attend a dinner party for Robert Kennedy on Wednesday, June 27. The Lawfords came for Marilyn early that evening, and with them was the attorney general—at Marilyn’s specific invitation, for she had invited them all to see her new home. From there, they proceeded to the Lawfords’ house for dinner; later, the attorney general’s driver delivered her back to Fifth Helena. “They all came over to see the house,” according to Eunice. “She certainly didn’t go sneaking around with Mr. Kennedy or have a love affair with him!”4

  All other accounts simply cannot be proven. Those who claim Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had a tryst in Los Angeles on November 18, 1961, for example, fail to deal with the fact that on that date, Kennedy was in New York, addressing a convocation at Fordham University; Marilyn, who was preparing for her photographic sessions with Douglas Kirkland, dined in Los Angeles with the Greensons after a psychiatric session at the doctor’s home. Such tale-spinners are equalled only by those who place the lovers’ meetings on February 24 and March 14, 1962: on the first date, Kennedy was in Bonn, Germany, and Marilyn was in Mexico; on the second, he was in Washington addressing the American Business Council while she had just moved into her new home and had in her company Joe DiMaggio. And so it goes.

  As long as he knew Robert Kennedy, said Edwin Guthman, he never had the remotest impression of an affair with Marilyn—much less any other woman.

  Ethel was the woman in his life, and he seemed uninterested in any other except in the normal, socially acceptable and public way of such things. That summer, Marilyn did indeed call [Kennedy] several times at his Washington office. Bobby was a good listener, and he took an interest in her questions, her life, even her troubles. But the truth is that for me, for Bobby, and for Angie [Novello, Kennedy’s secretary], the calls became something of a joke, and certainly nothing secret or whispered. We would say to one another something like, ‘Oh, here she is again, with questions about this or that.’ But these were always brief conversations. He was not a man to spend a lot of time on small talk with anyone. And to have an affair? Well, frankly it wasn’t in his character.

  To a person, Hollywood and New York reporters who knew Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy are unanimous in agreement. “The man [with whom she had the brief affair] was not Bobby Kennedy, but his brother John,” wrote Earl Wilson. “There was no doubt it was Jack and not Bobby,” according to Marilyn’s old friend Henry Rosenfeld. And Richard Goodwin, assistant special counsel to President Kennedy, a director of the subsequent Robert Kennedy campaigns and a leading scholar on the Kennedy family, put the matter simply: “Anyone who knew Bobby Kennedy knew that it was not in his temperament [to have an affair]. We had many intimate talks over the years, and Marilyn Monroe’s name never came up. Given Bobby’s relation to his brother, it would have been unthinkable for him to ‘take over’ the relationship, as some have claimed.”5 As for Marilyn, she asked Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts if they had heard rumors of a romance between her and Robert Kennedy; when they replied that indeed they had, she insisted they were false. (Furthermore, according to Ralph and Rupert, Marilyn did not find the younger Kennedy physically appealing.)6

  Four days after the February 1 dinner at the Lawford house, Marilyn was in New York, en route to visit Isadore Miller, then living in Florida, and from there she was going on for a shopping trip in Mexico. Her devotion to Miller in his lonely widowhood, like her affection and generosity to Arthur’s children, continued uninterrupted until her death, even after Arthur’s marriage to Inge Morath early in 1962. After Marilyn moved into her new home that March she often sent Isadore, Bobby and Jane gifts, made frequent offers of airline tickets for them to visit her in California and asked what she might do for them as their friend.7

  In New York, Marilyn was first happily reunited with the Strasbergs. They attended the Old Vic’s production of Macbeth at the City Center with her on February 6. Marilyn then spent three days discussing with Paula the first, incomplete draft of the script for Something’s Got to Give, and she attended several open and private classes at the Actors Studio. At the same time, she received many messages from California each day—about her new home; about the starting date for the film (she had yet to meet Weinstein); about calls from Joe, who was surprised to locate her in New York when he had made a special journey to visit her in Los Angeles; from Greenson, who called at least once daily. All these messages were meticulously recorded, logged and preserved by Cherie Redmond.

  In addition to the calls, there were meetings with representatives of Life magazine regarding a forthcoming interview, and a conversation with Alan Levy that formed the basis of a long article in Redbook later that year. Like Marilyn’s friends, Levy found her thoughtful and articulate.

  Eunice, meanwhile, had obtained from Marilyn several hundred dollars’ advance on her weekly salary and departed Los Angeles on Monday, February 12. She visited her brother-in-law Churchill Murray in Mexico City, checked into a hotel and awaited Marilyn’s arrival for their shopping expedition. No matter that Pat Newcomb was entirely prepared to attend Marilyn as friend and companion on the trip: Greenson had arranged that Eunice was to be with them.

  “It wasn’t hard to understand,” Pat said later. “Eunice was simply Greenson’s spy, sent down to report back everything Marilyn did. Soon even Marilyn began to see this.”

  On Saturday the seventeenth, Marilyn arrived in Miami, where she was met by Pat Newcomb and by her new personal Los Angeles hairstylist, George Masters (who had the painstaking task of maintaining Marilyn’s platinum color). For three days, Marilyn entertained Isadore, taking him to dinner at the Hotel Fontainebleau’s Club Gigi and to a cabaret show at the Minaret. That spectacle was a disappointment, according to Miller, but when he suggested that they leave, Marilyn, who had been recognized, was unwilling to hurt the performers’ feelings by rising to depart. The next evening, she gave a dinner for several of Isadore’s friends, and after she departed on Tuesday, he found two hundred dollars in an overcoat pocket. He had spent more than that on her in times past, she replied when he telephoned later to protest. “You see,” he said later, “Marilyn wanted me to protect her [like a father], but she also protected me.”

  Apart from her hospitalizations, Marilyn had not been much in the public eye for over a year, and so Pat Newcomb and George Masters joined her for the trip to Mexico City: two press conferences had been arranged at the Hilton, to reveal a slim, lovely Marilyn shopping for her new home and speaking enthusiastically (despite her misgivings about the project) of going to work the following month on Something’s Got to Give. Over eleven days beginning February 21, Marilyn met the press and then, in the company of Fred Vanderbilt Field and his wife Nieves (to whom she was just then introduced through mutual friends), Marilyn toured Cuernavaca, Toluca, Taxco and Acapulco. They rummaged local shops, bought native furniture and housewares and ordered Mexican tiles for Marilyn’s new kitchen and bathrooms. And as Pat and Eunice both noted, Marilyn took no sleeping pills, no drugs of any sort during this time.

  While Pat expertly supervised press relations throughout the trip, George saw that Marilyn was—even on a casual outing—perfect to behold. “Whenever she was being made up and I was doing her hair that extraordinary platinum,” George recalled,

  some incredible change occurred and she became “Marilyn Monroe.” Her voice changed, her hands and body motions altered and suddenly she was a different woman from the plain girl with faded blue jeans and a worn shirt I’d seen a few moments before. I’ve never seen anything like this complete change of personality. She was brilliant. She knew how to become what people expected.

  He also found Eunice extraordinary, but (like Marilyn’s other friends) in a different way. “She was—how can I put it?—a very weird woman, like a witch. Terrifying, I remember thinking. She was terrifically j
ealous of Marilyn, separating her from her friends—just a divisive person.”

  But such efforts on Eunice’s part were unavailing when it came to a new and brief acquaintance Marilyn made that month. A Mexican Monroe fan named José Bolaños located them, claiming to be a writer as well as an admirer. Slim and dark with movie-star good looks, he was Marilyn’s occasional escort for social events during the journey. Then, from Los Angeles, came the news of another Golden Globe Award for Marilyn, to be presented in March—whereupon she said to Pat, “I guess I can go to the dinner with Sidney Skolsky.” Instead, Pat suggested that it would be good publicity for her to invite Bolaños to fly back as her escort for that evening.

  At their expense, he was thrilled to do so. On Friday, March 2, the little entourage returned to Los Angeles, and the following Monday she again received the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s award as “the world’s favorite female star.” George Masters, who helped prepare Marilyn for the evening, recalled that she ordered a green, floor-length beaded dress and then summoned two seamstresses from Fox; she stood for seven hours while the women recut the dress so that it would be dramatically backless instead of scooped-neck.

  The presence of Marilyn with José at the dinner ignited rumors of a new Latin lover. Whatever the extent of the relationship (it does not seem to have been very romantic), José was back in Mexico soon after the award dinner, for another Joe had arrived, as if on cue. Unwilling to contest the presence of the legendary slugger, José retreated to his prior position as Marilyn’s ultimate Mexican fan, with what supplementary memories may never be known.

  Joe’s unexpected arrival was not due to jealousy. He had heard (as who familiar with Hollywood news had not) that Marilyn’s deportment at the award dinner that Monday evening was uncharacteristically embarrassing: she was, as her friend Susan Strasberg observed, “drunk, barely in control, her voice slurred—and she wore a dress so tight she could hardly move.” For once, the silence in the room betokened not admiration or awe but, even in Hollywood, shock.

  There were both chemical and emotional causes for her unusual conduct. She had received several injections on Saturday, Sunday and Monday from Hyman Engelberg—“vitamin shots,” as Eunice Murray euphemistically called them, but clearly more potent combinations of drugs. Among them were Nembutal, Seconal and phenobarbital (all dangerous and habituating barbiturates) and, for quick sleep, chloral hydrate (the so-called Mickey Finn knockout drops). These drugs, also provided for Marilyn in capsule form by prescription, were not so strictly controlled by the government then as they were later.

  As the noted pathologist Dr. Arnold Abrams observed later, “It was irresponsible to provide this sort of thing in the amounts Marilyn Monroe received them, even in 1962. These were known to be toxic drugs requiring careful monitoring. This was not 1940, when there was far less knowledge about this kind of medication.” To make matters worse, Greenson, too, began to provide heavier doses of sleeping pills; only later did he and Engelberg try to coordinate their prescriptions, with completely ineffectual results.

  For physicians held in such apparent high regard, they failed egregiously to note the difference between relaxation and relief from stress. When Marilyn Monroe awoke after an intake of barbiturates, she was just as anxious as before—over professional matters that were quickly exacerbated by drugs. Barbiturates, like Valium and Librium (then being widely introduced), clearly relaxed people, but there was an erroneous assumption that they also relieved stress. Quite the contrary: the patient simply awoke with the same anxieties, which often seemed worse because of the depressing effect of the drugs themselves. Pat Newcomb, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts knew that Marilyn’s medicine cabinet and bedside table resembled sample drawers at Schwab’s: she had a veritable pharmacopoeia at her disposal.8

  “During and after The Misfits,” as Roberts remembered, “Greenson took no steps to get Marilyn off drugs: in fact he provided them.” And with an eventual tolerance of three hundred milligrams of Nembutal nightly, she was indeed in a precarious situation—and of this neither physician could have been unaware. As Pat Newcomb said, “It is hard to understand negligence such as that.” Maintaining a roster of rich, famous and needy clients may provide at least a partial explanation, if not an excuse. “I never liked Greenson,” said Allan Snyder years later, “and never thought he was good for Marilyn. He gave her anything she wanted, just fed her with anything. There seemed something strange and phony about his entire relationship with Marilyn. And when he got himself on the Fox payroll, I was certain of it.”

  There was also an element of emotional turmoil that lay behind Marilyn’s heavy sedation that weekend. On Saturday, March 3, she saw Greenson for the first time in a month: cheerful when she arrived, she was tearful and depressed after the session. Indeed, she did not return to José Bolaños (who had checked in with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel that night), but instead remained with the Greensons. The content of her therapeutic session cannot be determined. Separately, it is known that Marilyn was greatly distressed by the news that Nunnally Johnson had completed his work on Something’s Got to Give and departed the project, which now seemed destined for disaster because no one could resolve (much less update) the script’s complicated emotional threads, nor could any satisfactory conclusion be found for the story. “I don’t know whether it will ever be made or not,” Johnson wrote to his old colleague Jean Negulesco. “They seem to be too scared at Fox.”

  For several days, Arnold Shulman (the original scenarist) was recalled, but it seemed to him that

  the studio simply wanted to forget about the picture, which they couldn’t do because they had a tableful of signed contracts to pay off. I adored Marilyn, and when I confronted Peter Levathes and a few other good men at Fox that this was my understanding of the whole rotten scheme, it was unmistakable that this was their plan.

  Fox, as David Brown recalled, was nearly bankrupt at the time, and among the films and television series then shooting at the studio, Something’s Got to Give was the most expensive. In addition, the situation was disastrous whether the picture was completed or not. If completed and released as scripted, it would be one of the most pallid, unfunny, emotionally confused “comedies” ever to come from a major studio—as the eight hours of outtakes and almost sixty minutes of edited, completed footage reveal. The final disposition of things in June leaves the distinct impression of a film no one believed would ever be completed—except Marilyn, who was, according to David Brown,

  an artist who knew exactly what she needed and what was good for her career—and she knew very well that if she were the cause of the picture’s collapse, it would have been the very worst thing for her career. She knew she would have to do the picture once she had signed for it. She was a thorough professional, whatever her personal problems. She hadn’t become Marilyn Monroe without serious ambition, after all, and it didn’t desert her in 1962.

  Shulman summed up the matter as he saw it: the new team of studio executives in charge at a time of unimaginable financial chaos wanted to force Marilyn’s hand—to make her quit the project—enabling them to sue her for breach of contract. “No matter what anybody writes,” Shulman told Marilyn that weekend, “they’re going to ruin the deal.”

  When Marilyn arrived at Greenson’s home that weekend, then, she had reason for anxiety: Marilyn—who could hardly be called paranoid about this matter—rightly believed that the new regime at Fox considered her a dispensable commodity.

  But Greenson’s method for dealing with her put the emphasis on his own needs, not hers. His technique was again an infringement of a cardinal rule of patient care: he invited her into the security of his home, under the pretext that hers would not be ready for the move-in until late the following week. As an almost incidental issue, there was José Bolaños, of whom Greenson could not have approved (otherwise the man would not have been summarily dismissed). So there was Marilyn, the Greenson subordinate, again dependent on her therapist instead of on her own r
esources, attached to him instead of her own choices and her own friends.

  Even attorney Milton Rudin, who was Greenson’s brother-in-law and who said he “loved and admired [Greenson] like a brother,” recognized that whatever Greenson’s conscious motives, “he involved Marilyn beyond [the point] he should have with the family. He was worried about her all the time—and then he involved me in the situation, too. Well, it was easy to feel sorry for Marilyn, and my brother-in-law was a compassionate man.”

  By Tuesday, March 6, Marilyn was still at the Greenson house, and it was then that Joe arrived in Los Angeles, traced her to Franklin Street, and went to visit, hoping to help prepare for the move to Fifth Helena, by then firmly scheduled for Thursday and Friday. But when he arrived, a strange and disturbing thing happened, witnessed by a doctor under Greenson’s supervision for psychotherapeutic internship.

  On arrival, the young doctor learned that Marilyn Monroe was upstairs, “in residence” as she had often been during the previous year, and now under sedation for emotional collapse. This arrangement, he then believed (and still did many years later), was

  out of line for a prominent training analyst who was supposed to be teaching students both the proper frame in which to help people and the proper professional identity to keep in working with patients.