Jack Kennedy understood. Gene Tierney had once said, “I’m not sure I can explain the nature of Jack’s charm. He made you feel very secure. He gave you his time, his interest.” Kennedy’s attentiveness, wit, and directness, along with his ability to make you feel secure, were certainly not lost on Marilyn.
Peter Lawford and others observed that Jack Kennedy merely regarded Marilyn as another trophy to be added to his extensive collection, but Kennedy and Marilyn had a unique relationship that ultimately endured for over a decade. Few of his casual affairs with women could claim such longevity. Unlike his relationships with Inga Arvad and Gene Tierney, the relationship with Marilyn endured despite geographic separations, marriage, and other inconveniences, and when all hope of her relationship with Arthur Miller came to an end, she continued seeing Jack Kennedy.
Lena Pepitone, who was at the Manhattan apartment from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., said that Marilyn spoke much more about Jack Kennedy than Bobby Kennedy, and “referred to him as ‘that big tease.’ He was always telling her dirty jokes, pinching her, squeezing her, she said. She told me that he was always putting his hand on her thigh. One night, under the dinner table, he kept going. But when he discovered she wasn’t wearing any panties, he pulled back and turned red. ‘He hadn’t counted on going that far,’ Marilyn laughed.”
According to Pepitone, Marilyn thought that Jack Kennedy had married Jacqueline Bouvier “because their families made them…. I feel sorry for them, locked into a marriage I bet neither of them likes. I can tell he’s not in love—not with her.”
Jack Kennedy had told Marilyn that he was in love with her, and she revealed to Bob Slatzer, who had visited her in New York, that she and Kennedy would one day be married. Kennedy had led Marilyn to believe he would seek an annulment of his marriage with Jacqueline.
According to Susan Strasberg, “Marilyn seemed bored with the part-time role of country housewife,” and in 1959 she seldom visited the Roxbury farm, where Miller was preoccupied with The Misfits. In March the Millers attended the New York premiere of Some Like It Hot. Newspaper photos taken of Marilyn on Miller’s arm at the premiere party show her radiant and smiling, giving no hint of domestic discord or her intense dissatisfaction with any aspect of Some Like It Hot. Uncharacteristically, she went to Chicago on a promotional tour—something she had not done since Love Happy.
Jack Kennedy was another visitor to the Windy City at the same time. In meetings with Sam Giancana and Mayor Daley, JFK was soliciting assistance for his forthcoming election campaign. According to Sam Giancana’s brother, Chuck, meetings were held at the Ambassador East and both Sam Giancana and Mayor Richard Daley were there. FBI surveillance confirms that a deal was struck in which the Mafia would assist JFK’s campaign. One of Mayor Daley’s aides was surprised to find that Marilyn Monroe was also a guest at the Ambassador.
Returning to New York, Marilyn resumed her classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and while Miller was preoccupied with the cinematic iconography of his wife, she was pursuing her own literary interests: lunching with Carson McCullers at her Nyack home, having poetry discussions with Isak Dinesen, visiting with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Profiles in Courage at the Carlyle, and having literary discussions with Carl Sandburg, who became an occasional visitor at the Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. Sandburg found Marilyn to be “warm and plain” and asked for her autograph. “Marilyn was a good talker and very good company,” he stated. “We did some mock play acting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me how she came up the hard way, but she would never talk about her husbands.”
Marilyn’s contract with Fox required her to fill a studio commitment before she could proceed with the MMP production of The Misfits. Fox producer Jerry Wald had suggested Let’s Make Love, a Technicolor musical comedy written by Norman Krasna, which was to be directed by George Cukor and costar Gregory Peck.
Though the script had obvious problems, Marilyn agreed to do the film in order to fulfill her Fox commitment, and Miller agreed to rewrite the screenplay. Miller recalled, “I had all but given up any hope of writing: I had decided to devote myself to giving [Marilyn] the kind of emotional support that would convince her she was no longer alone in the world—the heart of the problem, I assumed. I went so far as to do some rewriting on Let’s Make Love to try and save her from a complete catastrophe, work I despised on a script not worth the paper it was typed on.”
In September, Marilyn flew to the West Coast for studio conferences on Let’s Make Love and met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a reception held at Fox Studios. “You’re a very lovely young lady,” Khrushchev said. Her response made newspaper headlines around the world: “My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greetings. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.” And in a rare tribute from the gentlemen of the fourth estate, as she boarded the plane to return to the East Coast the crush of reporters broke into applause instead of bombarding her with questions.
While Marilyn was in Hollywood, Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, had arrived in New York, where Montand was to open his highly successful one-man show at the Henry Miller Theater. Marilyn went to the opening night with Montgomery Clift and was so impressed by Montand’s performance that she returned the next night with Miller and Norman and Hedda Rosten. Rosten recalled that the audience snickered at unlikely moments because it was obvious Montand’s pants were unbuttoned—a recurring problem.
When Gregory Peck became aware that Arthur Miller was rewriting Norman Krasna’s script for Marilyn, and his part was diminishing day by day, he dropped out of the film. Arthur suggested that Peck be replaced by Yves Montand, and Marilyn agreed. After Jerry Wald and George Cukor saw Montand’s show, he was signed by Fox as Marilyn’s costar, and Arthur began rewriting the Peck role for Montand.
In November and December, Marilyn commuted between New York and Hollywood for wardrobe fittings, color tests, and rehearsals of the musical numbers, which were choreographed by Marilyn’s friend Jack Cole. According to the British singing star Frankie Vaughan, who played a supporting role, “She was always on time for rehearsals. There were none of those notorious late starts. When she arrived, everybody smartened up, as if her presence was the light that fell on everyone. Certainly she seemed to be very professional.”
By the end of 1959, many of Marilyn’s dreams had become realities. Having received rave reviews in four successive motion pictures, she had earned the film industry’s respect and had become the world’s top box-office attraction—the most celebrated film star of the twentieth century. But when George Belmont of Marie Claire asked her if she was happy, she said, “If I can realize certain things in my work, I come the closest to being happy. But it only happens in moments. I’m not just generally happy. If I’m generally anything, I guess I’m generally miserable, but since I’m only thirty-three and have a few years to go yet, I hope to have time to become better and happier, professionally and in my personal life. That’s my one ambition. Maybe I’ll need a long time, because I’m slow. I don’t want to say that it’s the best method, but it’s the only one I know and it gives me the feeling that in spite of everything life is not without hope.”
Though she knew her marriage to Arthur Miller was all but over, she had her career, and she dreamed that one day she might be Mrs. John Kennedy. “You have to remember that Marilyn worked and lived in a dream world,” confided her friend Henry Rosenfeld. “She began to live in her dreams, and her dream was to marry Jack Kennedy—and supplant Jackie.”
But during the holiday season of 1959, Marilyn’s dream reached the rainbow’s end. In December it was made clear that Jack Kennedy would never divorce his wife. Jack was going to run for president. Divorce was out of the question.
At a dinner party in Manhattan Norman Rosten noticed the sadness that enveloped her.
I watched her seated on the windowsill sipping her drink, staring moodily down to t
he street below. I knew that look more and more. She was floating off in her personal daydream, out of contact, gripped by thoughts that could not be pleasant. I went up to her and said softly, “Hey, pssst, come back.”
She turned. “I’m going to have sleep trouble again tonight. I get that way now and then…and I’m thinking it’s a quick way down from here.” I nodded because it was a fact, but it was the first time she spoke of this. She continued, “Who’d know the difference if I went?” I answered, “I would—and all the people in this room who care. They’d hear the crash.” She laughed. Right then and there we made a pact. If either of us was about to jump, or take the gas, or the rope, or pills, he or she would phone the other. We each committed ourselves to talk the other out of it. We made the pact jokingly, but I believed it. I felt that one day I would get a call. She’d say, “It’s me. I’m on the ledge,” and I’d reply, “You can’t jump today, it’s Lincoln’s birthday,” or something unfunny, like that.”
According to Dr. Ralph Greenson’s correspondence with Marianne Kris, Greenson first met Marilyn in bungalow 21 of the Beverly Hills Hotel when the actress had a nervous collapse. Though it has been variously written that Marilyn’s breakdown took place because she was distraught over her brief love affair with Yves Montand, Dr. Greenson’s correspondence with Kris establishes that he first visited Marilyn Monroe in January 1960, which was prior to the affair with her Let’s Make Love costar but soon after Jack Kennedy announced he was running for president.
According to Ralph Greenson’s wife, Hildi, Marilyn’s New York psychoanalyst had called Greenson to ask if he would see her patient for a few sessions to help her over a “difficult situation.” Dr. Kris explained that Marilyn was suffering “severe anxiety stress.” But there were unusual circumstances that brought Otto Fenichel’s disciple, the former Romeo Greenschpoon, to Norma Jeane’s door. When Greenson first visited Marilyn, he had become well established in the Freudian couch culture of Hollywood. Among his more illustrious clients were Peter Lorre, Celeste Holm, producer Dore Schary, Vincente Minnelli, Inger Stevens, and Frank Sinatra. When Sinatra had become despondent over the breakup of his marriage to Ava Gardner and slashed his wrists, his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, suggested that Sinatra see Rudin’s brother-in-law, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Rudin was an attorney for Gang, Tyre, and Brown, which often represented entertainment personalities under investigation by the Un-American Activities Committee, and insiders would joke as to which brother-in-law had the more star-studded clientele, the lawyer or the analyst. Dr. Greenson was on the Communist Party’s secret list of analysts approved for party members, and often their clients overlapped.
Mickey Rudin was both Frank Sinatra’s and Marilyn Monroe’s lawyer, and Rudin and his wife, Elizabeth Greenschpoon Rudin, were privy to Marilyn’s intimacy with the presidential candidate, as of course were Marianne Kris and Miller’s analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein. Marianne Kris and her late husband Ernst were good friends of Ralph and Hildi Greenson, as well as friends of Greenson’s former Air Force commander, John M. Murray.*
It was an odd set of circumstances and relationships that had brought Marilyn Monroe into this close-knit circle of Freudian-Marxists, and when Greenson knocked on Norma Jeane’s door he arrived with an uncommon knowledge of Marilyn’s relationship with JFK and an insight into the problems that had led his patient into her “severe anxiety stress.”
Dr. Greenson found the film star heavily sedated. Marilyn slurred her words and had poor reactions. She seemed remote and failed to understand simple conversation. When she proceeded to recite the litany of drugs she had been taking—Demerol, sodium pentothal, phenobarbital, amytal—he became alarmed. Greenson’s immediate problem was to bring her drug abuse under control. Later, he was to express his anger at the “stupid doctors” who had caved in to Marilyn’s prescription requests. Marilyn had a long list of doctors in her phone book whom she could ply with her needs. In the future Dr. Greenson would try to make sure she used only one physician, and he strongly recommended a prominent Beverly Hills internist—Dr. Hyman Engelberg.
Dr. Greenson’s visit to Marilyn’s bungalow lasted several hours, and by the time he departed Marilyn felt much better. Impressed by Greenson’s warmth and understanding, she asked him to return on a regular basis. So began what would prove to be a very unusual doctor-patient relationship which ended in Marilyn Monroe’s death two and a half years later.
After several visits with Greenson, Marilyn returned to rehearsals for Let’s Make Love. Although she was officially a patient of Marianne Kris’s, while she was on the West Coast she was under Greenson’s care. In the ensuing months, Greenson and Kris would correspond and compare notes. Greenson wrote that his goal was to wean Marilyn from her array of drugs and help her with her sleeping problems. He reported listening to her “Venomous resentment” toward Arthur Miller. She claimed her husband was “cold and unresponsive” to her problems and attracted to other women. He also noted symptoms of paranoia and observed signs of schizophrenia. He wrote, “As she becomes more anxious, she begins to act like an orphan, a waif, and she masochistically provokes [people] to mistreat her and to take advantage of her. As fragments of her past history came out, she began to talk more about the traumatic experience of an ‘orphan child.’” Undoubtedly they discussed the problems which had precipitated her breakdown, and he observed her acute sense of rejection.
Marilyn was very impressed by the analyst’s knowledge and understanding. She began to refer to him as “My Jesus—My Savior.” When Marilyn telephoned Lena Pepitone in New York she raved about her new analyst and said, “Lena, Lena, I’ve finally found him. I’ve found a Jesus for myself!”
“A Jesus?” asked Pepitone.
“Yes, I call him Jesus. He’s doing wonderful things for me.”
“What?” Pepitone inquired, “What does he do?”
“He listens to me.”
“What exactly does he do for you besides listen?” Pepitone asked.
“He gives me courage. He makes me feel smart, makes me think. I can face anything with him. I’m not scared anymore.”
However, Marilyn was unaware of the curious set of circumstances that had brought Dr. Ralph Greenson to the door of the fascinating woman who knew many secrets about the man who was destined to be president of the United States.
A case history for the files of the Kremlin was on the couch.
PART V
1960–1962
Rainbow’s End
45
Let’s Make Love
If Marilyn is in love with my husband, it proves she has good taste.
—Simone Signoret
At a press reception held by Fox for Yves Montand in January 1960, Marilyn was the smiling, beautiful hostess. “She still has the old glamour, the magic,” wrote Sidney Skolsky. Making a toast to Montand, Marilyn stated, “Next to my husband and Marlon Brando, I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”
When asked how he felt about working with Monroe, Montand commented, “Everything she do is, how you say?—‘original’—even when she stand and talk to you.” Montand added in his best manufractured Franglaise, “She help me, I try to help her.”
But he didn’t know just how much help she needed. He didn’t know that her marriage to Arthur Miller was all but over, and he didn’t know about Jack Kennedy. Montand had a morphological resemblance to Miller, but none of Miller’s coldness; he had the warmth and charm of Jack Kennedy, but none of the calculating duplicity. Montand didn’t know that everything she do was, how you say?—on the rebound.
Shortly after the Millers moved into bungalow 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Fox arranged for Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, to move into bungalow 20—just next door. The two couples became immediate friends and joined each other for home-cooked meals and late-night discussions. The Montands had starred in the French production of The Crucible, and they shared Arthur’s political convictions; Simone Signoret appreciated Marilyn’s humor and
eccentricities. She didn’t see Marilyn as a threat.
Montand was so totally preoccupied with trying to learn English and master his lines that he was oblivious to le piège amoureux he had fallen into. “If I was thinking of falling in love with anything,” he said, “it was the English language. I was a million miles from thinking that anything whatsoever could happen between Marilyn and me. In the beginning Marilyn and I had only one thing in common—our obsession with our work. She worked, worked, worked.”
One evening in February after filming had begun, the Montands and the Millers had gone to La Scala for dinner and were driving back to the hotel when Marilyn whispered to Yves, “You know, Cukor’s not such a hot director.”
“What?”
“Cukor’s a lousy director.”
“Sorry, don’t say that. Is not true,” Montand replied, already in a bit of a panic because he couldn’t understand a word Cukor said. “Cukor great director—you look beautiful, but I think you’re afraid of acting. You need—how you say?—rehearsals.”
“Yes, you’re right. I think maybe we should rehearse,” Marilyn replied.
Montand recalled that was how they began to work together, seeking to calm their respective fears. “I would knock at her door, or she would come to me. We would sit facing each other and rehearse. She corrected my English, and I did my best to get her to trust herself. The image that comes back to me is of Marilyn in jeans, a plaid shirt open at the neck, and those incredibly blue eyes that maintained the clarity other women’s only rarely possess.”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 38
