Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  “Marilyn couldn’t walk across a room without advice and counsel and people with vested interest,” Levathes said years later.

  Her so-called advisors created the difficulties and caused her a terrible identity crisis. I thought Marilyn was a nice woman—not a shallow person who made no distinctions, but someone who thought about her life, who knew the differences between sham and reality. She had depth; it wasn’t all fluff. She was enormously complex during her suffering and her absences from the production, but at her best there was no one like her.

  Cukor agreed: the advice she was getting was utter rubbish.

  On Sunday, April 22, after a session with Greenson, Marilyn rode down to Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles. There the veteran hair colorist Pearl Porterfield (who had cared for, among others, the wavy white coiffure of Mae West) prepared Marilyn for her first day on the set of Something’s Got to Give. Eunice was so impressed with the look when Marilyn arrived home that henceforth she had her thin brown hair washed and styled by Pearl Porterfield, too.

  Marilyn’s first scene was scheduled for Monday morning, April 23, but when she awoke she had a blinding headache, no voice, and impaired respiration: she was seen by her dentist (the only physician she could reach at five in the morning), who diagnosed acute sinusitis. For the rest of that week, she was ordered to rest at home, visits to Greenson being the sole exception. But such occurrences are hardly rare in movie-making, and there were contingency plans. Her point-of-view shots (what her character sees) were photographed that day, and, from Tuesday through Friday, scenes with Cyd Charisse and Dean Martin were filmed.

  Finally, on Monday, April 30, Marilyn appeared on the set promptly at nine for her first scenes in the picture. With her hair brilliantly white, her skin unblemished, her eyes clear and alert, she wore the required costume for her entrance: a red and white floral-print sheath, a white coat and white shoes. For seven hours—and over forty times, according to a careful count of the outtakes—she repeated the closeups in which, as Ellen Arden, she returns to her home for the first time in five years. Standing at poolside, she gazes in silent wonder at her little boy and girl, splashing playfully, at first oblivious of her presence and then, when they chat with her, of her identity. The scene is a miracle, and not only because Marilyn in fact still had a severe sinus infection and a fever of one hundred and one degrees: she was forcing herself to work.

  Finding her way through all the emotional complications of the character’s scene, she is alternately happy to see her children, frightened of their reaction, concerned for their welfare, proud of their growth and charm. In fully thirty of the forty takes Cukor directed, there is preserved forever Marilyn Monroe at the peak not only of her beauty but of the depth of her inner resources. With the daily help of Paula Strasberg, Marilyn had reached into her own lost childhood, and perhaps into the sorrow of her own failed pregnancies, and there she had found the mysterious complex of feelings that enabled her to give a simple scene its wistful, fully human regret. As in nothing she had done since Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, there is in this incomplete film the relic of an astonishing performance. Her smile is unforced, her brows arch and her eyes just begin to glaze with tears, as if a wash of memories has evoked both penance and longing.

  The Marilyn Monroe of this film is wholly unlike that of All About Eve or Niagara, of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Seven Year Itch. She is mature, serene, fragile—but graceful and resplendent, too. None of the emotions were manufactured: they were, to the contrary, deeply felt, imagined, lived in some way. The laughter with the children moments later is neither cute nor manic, but joyous, wise, confident that somehow all will be well. No one who sees them (or the few moments preserved in the 1990 commercial documentary that bears the film’s title) can for a moment see this as anything but the efforts of a responsible and sensitive actress evoking recognizable human feeling and continuing to grow as an artist, just as she wished.

  Marilyn worked until four o’clock that afternoon, when she returned home and collapsed into bed. Next day, Engelberg pronounced her ill with a sinus infection and unable to work—a judgment confirmed when Fox sent Seigel, who rang the executive offices to say he would not ask even the film’s cocker spaniel to perform in such a condition. Marilyn was ordered to bed for the remainder of the week, and the studio was so informed. There was an ancillary issue at stake, too: with the hugging scenes Marilyn was required to do with them, her closeness was considered risky for the health of the two children.

  “She was genuinely ill,” according to Marjorie Plecher, “as anyone could see. But the studio didn’t want to believe her.” Allan Snyder agreed: Marilyn, never strong physically, had been susceptible to colds and respiratory infections over the fifteen years he had known her, and that week she spiked a high fever with her sinus infection: “But no one wanted to hear about that.” Pat Newcomb also knew this to be true.

  On each day of the production call sheets from May 1 through 4, Marilyn’s absence was announced as if it were a last-minute development each morning. Evelyn Moriarty said she was always informed a day or two in advance of Marilyn’s continuing leave: “Marilyn did not simply not show up!” Alternate shooting could be hastily scheduled in her absence.

  Despite illness, Marilyn worked with Paula for hours at home. But then Fox pulled another tactical error, sending a messenger at ten or eleven each night with revised script pages printed, according to tradition, on a different color paper from the previous or original pages of dialogue; these new lines had been composed by this writer or that one, by Cukor, by anyone willing to risk what now seemed impossible. With all this confusion, “Marilyn was shattered,” according to Nunnally Johnson, who kept in touch with her and the production. She saw her comeback film as a terrible failure, and she was right. “And then more and more [revisions] arrived, until in the end there were only four pages left from the original script.” When Cukor and Weinstein learned the distress this was causing Marilyn, they tried to mislead her by having the changes inserted into a freshly bound script with all pages on the same color paper as the original. “She was much too smart [not to say experienced] to be misled by that trick,” concluded Johnson.

  That same week, when she complained to Weinstein and Levathes, Marilyn reminded them that she had permission to attend President Kennedy’s birthday gala in New York later in May. Evelyn Moriarty recalled that this absence was posted weeks in advance: indeed, the call sheet circulated on May 10 for May 17 noted that production would shut down that morning at eleven-thirty “because of Miss Monroe’s permission to go to N.Y.” It would have been unimaginable for the studio to deny the presence of Hollywood’s most famous star at a command performance. In addition, performers with other commitments were readily released for this special event, each sent to provide a portion of the evening’s entertainment. Marilyn’s upcoming appearance was already known and promulgated in New York, as Hedda mentioned to Cherie in a letter posted the first week of May.

  For the occasion, Marilyn was submitting to hours of fittings with Jean Louis, who had created the notorious gown worn by Marlene Dietrich in 1953 for her nightclub premiere—a skintight array of sequins, brilliants, rhinestones and chiffon that covered and flattered while giving the illusion of nudity. In Dietrich’s case, a foundation garment was also required; Marilyn, however, would wear merely a sheer body stocking embroidered with sequins, so that she would seem to glitter in the spotlight. Literally sewn into it the evening of the party, she would wear, as Life magazine stressed later, “nothing, absolutely nothing, underneath,” and would appear enveloped only by reflected, diffused light—a veritable star indeed. Eunice made plain her disapproval of such a daring outfit: “It might have been more graceful if it were looser,” she said—to which Marilyn gaily replied, “Be brave, Mrs. Murray—be brave!”

  Although both Marilyn’s and the studio’s physicians ordered her to remain home from Tuesday through Friday (May 1 through 4), Cherie—now working on Marilyn�
��s behalf at Fox—was required to telephone Eunice daily to ascertain the patient’s health. Her log for May 1 contains a curious annotation: “At 4:00, I called [Eunice], who said she would ask Marilyn how she felt and bring me back a message. But she didn’t come back on the line. I didn’t call her back and left at 6:30.” There are several such omissions on Eunice’s part during April and May: she seems to have been afflicted with either a gradually failing memory or an astonishing lack of courtesy. In any case, Eunice seemed to be taking on the characteristics of one or another of Marilyn’s doctors.

  All that first week of May, Cukor shot around her, filming scenes with Dean Martin and Phil Silvers, Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse, a courtroom sequence on another sound stage, and Marilyn’s point-of-view shots. Again, Greenson insisted on seeing Marilyn twice daily, and on these outings her limousine logs include daily stops to the Vicente Pharmacy, the Horton & Converse drugstore or one or another Westwood chemist. Her analyst was still providing abundant medications—not for her sinus condition (that would have been the responsibility of Engelberg or Rubin, whom she also visited), but for her anxiety and depression over Something’s Got to Give. But the barbiturates and tranquilizers prescribed had exactly the opposite effect Greenson supposedly sought. Instead of encouraging Marilyn to work, the pills made her more and more dysfunctional: taken with the antibiotics, they became even more powerful sedatives and hypnotics, gradually rendering her confused, foggy and somnolent. Her condition could have been mistaken, by any passerby, as that of a confirmed alcoholic. To young Joan Greenson fell again the task of transporting Marilyn, often in a drug haze and with speech impaired, to and from her home when Rudy was off duty.

  In such a condition, Marilyn’s behavior toward friends would occasionally be demanding or socially inappropriate. She sometimes treated Pat like a personal servant rather than a professional assistant, ordering a second telephone line installed at Pat’s home in order to have constant access to her publicist, for any request or complaint, any hour day or night. Yet when Pat’s car went down with a terminal complaint, Marilyn presented her with a new one, waving away the cost.

  At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, May 7, Marilyn dutifully arrived for work, but a half-hour later, alternately perspiring and shaking with chills, she was sent home. Fearing this, Cukor and his unit manager had arranged an alternate schedule, and the company proceeded south to Balboa Island for other scenes. But by the time they arrived, the weather had turned inclement and remained so the next day. Everyone was back on the set Thursday, when Something’s Got to Give completed fourteen days of shooting (only one with Marilyn) and was four and a half days behind schedule—by no means a morbid situation, and one typical of many productions. With the usual Hollywood ingenuities (to cover, for example, accidents, illness, weather, revised scripts or new sets), plans could be rearranged: in fact the May 10 call sheet proposes only one additional day of shooting to compensate for losses thus far incurred.

  On Friday, May 11, Marilyn rang the studio and asked Evelyn to bring some items from her dressing room, a task her stand-in was glad to do. Arriving at Fifth Helena and hoping for the chance to visit Marilyn, Evelyn was summarily and curtly dismissed by Eunice: “I’m sorry, Miss Monroe is in conference.” As Evelyn later learned, Marilyn was simply at the other end of the house, or in the bath, and unaware of her friend’s arrival. “But what could I do?” Evelyn asked rhetorically years later. “Mrs. Murray was like a class monitor for Dr. Greenson”—or, one might add, like Mrs. Danvers, the nightmarish housekeeper who terrorized the second Mrs. de Winter after the death of Rebecca.

  Saturday, Paula arrived at the house with her sister Bea Glass, who had prepared homemade soups and delicacies Marilyn liked. Joe had come to stay for the weekend, and so there was briefly a circle of affectionate serenity around Marilyn, who was cheerful despite her lingering illness. Pat summarized the feelings of several confidants when she said that of all Marilyn’s entourage, “Paula was among the most loyal and helpful. She took the rap for Marilyn’s lateness, but she gave Marilyn a great deal. And she never tried to own Marilyn, or to cut others out of Marilyn’s life.” Ralph Roberts, who also stopped to visit, saw a warm and supportive atmosphere around Marilyn: “Joe was really the only one in her life then, and that gave us hope, for the rest of us knew there was something terribly wrong in Marilyn’s relationship with Greenson—even Rudy was aware of it.”

  Still, Greenson had established a profound dependency—and then he betrayed it. On May 10, he and his wife departed for a five-week trip abroad: he was to deliver a lecture in Israel and they were to proceed to Switzerland for a long overdue visit with her mother, who had suffered a stroke in February. Weinstein implored Greenson not to depart: “Ralph had made himself very central to her functioning,” Weinstein recalled, “and frankly, I was surprised and annoyed. He left when all of this was going on.” But the trip was one Greenson’s wife much anticipated, perhaps as much for the chance to put some distance between her husband and the patient to whom he was inordinately and inextricably attached: by this time, anyone who knew patient and therapist also knew that she had become virtually his career. Greenson himself admitted to a close friend that “Hildi was afraid to leave me home alone.”

  Greenson must have been fearful of leaving his patient, too—fearful for himself, his relationship with her, his control of her. What he did prior to his departure, however, was markedly injudicious.

  When I left for a five-week summer vacation, I felt it was indicated to leave her some medication which she might take when she felt depressed and agitated, i.e., rejected and tempted to act out. I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in combination with a sedative—Dexamyl. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on. I can condense the situation by saying that, at the time of my vacation, I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her.

  With this, the countertransference to which he referred—his dependence on Marilyn’s dependence on him—is as clear as the monumentally egocentric eroticism which had by this time taken control of him: Ralph Greenson was by now in the grip of an obsession over which, henceforth, he had no control. Hildi was quite right to be “afraid to leave [him] alone.” As for Dexamyl, it was an acceleration of the drug routine—a combination of Dexedrine and amobarbital—an amphetamine combined with a short-acting barbiturate that was eventually removed from the drug market because of the difficulty of achieving the correctly balanced ratio between the two chemicals.

  Before his departure, Greenson recommended that Paula be dismissed from the production of Something’s Got to Give: still projecting his own feelings onto others, he told Marilyn that Paula was simply taking advantage of her and her money. Marilyn said nothing, and in fact, although Paula soon departed for a brief trip to New York, Marilyn conveyed no such notice of dismissal to her or the studio.

  But she was annoyed with Eunice, and within days of Greenson’s departure she handed her a check and dismissed her. “By this time,” according to Pat, “Marilyn was on to Mrs. Murray. She resented her and wanted to get her out. Naturally those of us who were close to Marilyn were delighted.” With this single action alone, as Marilyn told her friends, she was making an important step in self-assertion, in establishing her independence from a woman whose meddling interference she resented and whose snooping was offensive. Acting the adult and taking responsibility for her action—this was, she always thought, the goal of her psychotherapy in any case.

  The deed must have encouraged and invigorated her, for that day Marilyn sped off to Fox and, for ten hours, submitted with remarkable patience and good humor to over fifty takes of a scene involving the family cocker spaniel. Expert in rehearsals, the dog (named Tippy by Marilyn, after the one she had lost in c
hildhood to a neighbor’s rage) refused to follow off-camera commands and cues, leaping around and behind her, panting and drooling over Marilyn for hours. Anyone else might have balked at kneeling so long on the ground waiting for an animal, but Marilyn laughed and joked that she knew how The Method could delay players until they find the right mood, and there was no reason a dog should not be similarly indulged. The hours of outtakes from this scene, often frustrating and uncomfortable for her, remain vastly amusing decades later. “He’s getting good!” she calls to Cukor after something like her twentieth take with the dog, and several times the film clips show Marilyn collapsing with laughter over the recalcitrant animal’s antics.

  Her energy and good humor continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 15 and 16. But with writers scribbling furiously, Weinstein attempting to wrest from Cukor a sense of how this picture could continue without a firm finale and several key roles still uncast, the only scenes to be filmed were retakes of Marilyn with the children at pool-side.

  The following morning, she was again on time for work, chatting excitedly about her departure for New York. At the same time, Fox’s telephone lines were jammed with a succession of calls to and from New York, aimed at preventing her journey. First, Weinstein learned from Cukor that if she were absent for Thursday afternoon and Friday’s shootings, the picture would be six days behind schedule, and the director would now have to account for the delays to the new executives. By this time, as Weinstein recalled, they had all forgotten an additional reason Marilyn would not be at work on the seventeenth: she had a letter of agreement appended to her contracts since 1956, to the effect that she would not be required at the studio during her menstrual period. “She had set that day aside before we began production,” Weinstein recalled years later, “and we had agreed we weren’t going to shoot that day.” This turned out to be a convenience for the film—but how could the producer and director say that her absence actually gave them time to work out the final script problems and complete the casting on this chaotic picture?