Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  The same problems existed that had undermined all of Marilyn’s other recent films. John Huston became as frustrated as had the other directors with whom she had worked. “You’ve got to get your wife off those pills,” the director told Arthur Miller. “They’re going to kill her.” Contrary to Dr. Ralph Greenson’s suggestion that she limit her consumption of drugs, Marilyn did just the opposite.

  Arthur Miller and Paula Strasberg walked into Marilyn’s bedroom one night in time to see a local doctor searching for a vein in her arm so he could inject her with Amytal. Monroe ordered her husband to get out. Feeling that he should do something, Miller called the head of the UCLA Medical School; the doctor advised the playwright to place his wife in a drug rehab program.

  Finally, taking matters into his own hands, Miller threw away all the drugs he could locate in their suite, and for a day or two, the tactic worked. However, within forty-eight hours, Monroe managed to replenish her supply of prescription medication by turning to the same physician who’d injected her with Amytal and who, it turned out, had been recommended to her by Montgomery Clift, her Misfits costar. Between takes on the set, Clift and Monroe would frequently huddle and compare notes on drugs and pharmaceuticals. Monty, like Marilyn, was the consummate insomniac.

  Miller’s confiscation of Marilyn’s cache of drugs so annoyed her that she moved out of their two-bedroom suite and into a similar suite with Paula Strasberg. In 1967, five years after Monroe’s death, Miller informed a New York Times reporter that while he’d known of Monroe’s addictions, he hadn’t realized the severity of her habit. “Marilyn’s addiction to pills and drugs ultimately defeated me,” he admitted. “If there was any key to her despair, I never found it. I didn’t realize her addiction was at the center of her problem. The psychiatrists thought it was a symptom. Regardles of their intentions, in the end they actually prescribed more pills.”

  Well into production, John Huston suspended work on the film. He’d reached the same conclusion as the head of the University of California Medical School: Marilyn needed to enter a drug rehabilitation facility. She seemed to be walking around in an utter daze, a trance. Her words were garbled; her eyes didn’t focus. She’d stopped functioning. Once again she’d tried to end it all by swallowing too many pills.

  Flown to Los Angeles, MM was admitted to Westside Hospital, a private, high-priced clinic that catered primarily to victims of drug and alcohol abuse. Dr. Kris arrived from New York to oversee Marilyn’s treatment program. To avoid unwanted publicity, Frank Taylor announced that Monroe had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Aside from Dr. Kris, Dr. Greenson, and Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s only visitor during her ten days in the unit was Joe DiMaggio, who’d read about her hospitalization and marital problems.

  “When Marilyn returned to Reno,” said Ralph Roberts, “she told me Joe DiMaggio had paid her a surprise visit at the hospital. ‘How did it go?’ I asked. With a big smile, she said, ‘Not bad—he spent the night. But when he wanted to leave in the morning, all the nurses and hospital aides started bothering him for his autograph.’ ‘What did he do?’ I asked. ‘He sighed and signed,’ she answered.”

  After her brief abstention from pharmaceuticals, and despite DiMaggio’s unannounced visit, it didn’t take Marilyn long to revert to her former drug obsession and her narcotics-crazed behavior. One evening the phone rang in Marilyn and Paula Strasberg’s suite. Paula answered. It was Arthur Miller, whose waking hours were now spent working on endless script rewrites for the next day’s shoot.

  “Believe it or not,” Paula said into the phone, “Marilyn’s asleep.”

  “It’s you I wanted to speak to,” said Miller. “Have you been keeping an eye on Marilyn?”

  “As much as possible. Why do you ask, Arthur?”

  “Because I heard she’s been running around the hotel in the nude.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” admitted Paula. “She was in the hotel elevator, traveling up and down, completely naked. She wandered into the casino. She was high as a kite.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Miller. “Last year the wife of the owner of the Algonquin Hotel in New York bumped into Marilyn on Fifth Avenue. Marilyn had on a new mink coat. The woman asked what Marilyn was wearing with it, and she replied, ‘Nothing,’ and opened the coat to prove it.”

  A few days after Miller’s phone call and the nude elevator episode, Marilyn left a note for Paula next to the phone: “Oh Paula, I wish I knew why I am so anguished. I think maybe I’m crazy like all the other members of my family.”

  Once more in the care of Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s ongoing drug involvement led the psychoanalyst to bring in a colleague, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, an internist and “physician to the stars,” whom Greenson had consulted about Monroe during her stay at Westside Hospital. Greenson first met Engelberg while an intern at Cedars of Lebanon. Born in New York in 1913, a graduate of the Cornell University School of Medicine, Engelberg shared with Greenson a profound interest in left-wing politics.

  In overseeing Marilyn’s drug regimen, Engelberg placed the actress on chloral hydrate, a sedative she’d sampled previously with mixed results. Ralph Roberts recalled a meeting he attended with Doctors Greenson and Engelberg, Marilyn, and Paula Strasberg, at which he was put on a massage schedule related to MM’s intake of the sedative. “I gave her four massages a day,” he said. “I massaged her in the morning before she left for the set, again during her midday break, then twice at night—once before dinner and then before she tried to fall sleep. I’d massage her in the near dark. Her body seemed to give off light. She’d take the chloral hydrate with the final massage. If she woke up during the night, she’d call me and I’d go to the front desk and pick up a chloral hydrate pill left there earlier in the evening by Dr. Engelberg. Marilyn wasn’t permitted to keep any other sedative in her suite or dressing room.”

  The plan enabled Greenson and Engelberg to monitor what she took and when she took it. Her disposition and demeanor improved, even more so when Engelberg began giving her injections of multivitamins and liver extract. Clark Gable took her aside and told her she was the best-adjusted person connected to the film. In a more positive frame of mind, she told Dr. Greenson that she’d heard about plans to make a movie in Hollywood based on Sigmund Freud’s life. She wondered what he thought of her participation in such a project. Greenson communicated Marilyn’s inquiry to Anna Freud, who instantly rejected the offer. “We’ll find you another role,” Greenson assured her.

  In early November 1960 the production finally drew to a close, forty days late and millions of dollars in the red. “But at least it’s done,” said an exhausted John Huston. Marilyn and her entourage celebrated by spending a weekend in San Francisco. “Joe was, I think, in New York,” said Ralph Roberts, “so Marilyn went down to the wharf and visited some of his brothers and sisters at the family-owned restaurant. Evidently they were thrilled to see her again. Next she dropped in on Lefty O’Doul at his bar. He didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a kerchief over her hair, dark glasses, a loose-fitting blouse, and pants. When he realized it was Marilyn, he went bananas. She said she had a wonderful time with Lefty. He kept saying to her, ‘You’ve got to come home again, Marilyn. You’ve got to come home.’ ”

  That night the group—Marilyn, Paula, May, Agnes, Agnes’s husband, and Ralph Roberts—went to the Blue Fox for dinner. “The hostess threw her arms around Marilyn,” said Roberts, “practically crying with joy. She was a cousin of Joe’s, and she seemed genuinely touched by Marilyn’s presence. Monty Clift joined us for dessert. After dinner, we went to Finocchio’s, a famous nightclub featuring female impersonators. We all wore dark glasses, with the agreement that if anyone recognized either Monty or Marilyn, we’d all rush out. We were seated at a big table in the second row and, amid much giggling and merriment, ordered our drinks.”

  One of the first performers was dressed and made up to look like Marilyn. The performer had captured her mannerisms, movements, and voice to
an impressive degree. Marilyn whispered to Roberts that she felt as if she were looking at herself in one of her movies. At the end of the entire show, as the various performers lined up for a company call, Roberts noticed that the Monroe impersonator was staring straight at the real Marilyn. “I’ll never forget the electric shock that came into her eyes when she realized that Marilyn was in the audience,” said Roberts. “She started frantically whispering to the performer that stood next to her, and the word spread down the line like wildfire. We’d paid and were about to leave. Marilyn blew her impersonator a kiss, and we hit the street. The next day Marilyn and I attended an Ella Fitzgerald concert. After the concert, we went to her dressing room, and Marilyn regaled her with the story of her impersonator from the night before.”

  By early November 1960, Marilyn had returned from California to her apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York. Arthur Miller had flown back by himself and moved into the Hotel Adams on East Eighty-Sixth Street. The newspapers were filled with reports of their impending divorce. One person who read the breakup news with avid interest was Joe DiMaggio Jr., currently a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

  “I hadn’t spoken to Marilyn in a while,” said Joe Jr. “After I finished up at Lawrenceville, she mailed me a check for a thousand dollars as a graduation present. I used the money to sail to Holland in June 1960 with Barrett Price, the son of Vincent Price. We bought bikes in Rotterdam and spent a couple of months touring Europe. When I got back, I tried out for the position of placekicker on Yale’s junior varsity football team, but there was this Hungarian soccer player who regularly booted fifty-yard field goals—and he did it barefoot, no less. So that didn’t work out.

  “Marilyn called me in late November. Her first concern was my happiness. How did I like Yale? I told her the truth: I didn’t, and I liked New Haven even less. What I didn’t mention was that I’d basically stopped attending classes. The only reason I’d been admitted to Yale was my family name, not because of my high school grades or college entrance exams. Of course, Marilyn had her own problems. She and Arthur Miller were about to get divorced. In addition, Clark Gable had just suffered a fatal heart attack, and apparently his widow, Kay, who was pregnant at the time, blamed Marilyn’s antics during The Misfits as the cause of Gable’s sudden death. Later they made up, and Kay invited Marilyn to the infant’s christening. Marilyn told me that the day Gable died, she called my father, and he arrived at her apartment and spent the night with her, and they talked about death. ‘I was amazed your father believes in an afterlife,’ said Marilyn. In later years, I thought to myself how odd it seemed that The Misfits marked not only Clark Gable’s last film but Marilyn’s, too.”

  Not long after Joey’s telephone conversation with Marilyn, the dean of students at Yale contacted Joe DiMaggio to report that his son had more or less dropped out of school. They didn’t want to expel him, but unless he began attending classes again, they would have little choice. “Treat my son as you would any other student,” DiMaggio responded. At the end of the first semester, Joe DiMaggio Jr. received a letter expelling him from the university. “Marilyn seemed more disappointed about it than my father,” said Joey. “I figured at least I’m saving him some money!”

  Joe DiMaggio spent Christmas of that year in San Francisco but sent Marilyn a huge basket of poinsettia. He flew to New York to celebrate New Year’s with Marilyn. Joining them for dinner, Lena Pepitone prepared a meal of spaghetti with sausage followed by a roast chicken. At midnight, Joe gallantly kissed both ladies. Marilyn wouldn’t allow Lena to clean up. She sent her home by taxi with a $200 tip. The next morning, Lena served the two lovers breakfast. They held hands across the table and called each other “Darling.” Marilyn wore a white terry cloth robe; Joe wore a white dress shirt and tie.

  On January 19, 1961, Marilyn Monroe, accompanied by her latest New York attorney, Aaron Frosch, and Pat Newcomb, a publicist who’d taken the place of Rupert Allan, traveled to Juárez, Mexico, to finalize divorce proceedings against Arthur Miller. The divorce was granted a day later by Judge Miguel Gomez Guerra on uncontested charges of “incompatibility of character.”

  The playwright shed few tears over the woman Newsweek proclaimed “the most famous female on the planet.” He’d already become involved with Inge Morath, a Magnum Agency photographer he’d met on the set of The Misfits and then met again when both were back in New York. Tall, dark haired, and slender, the Austrian-born Morath would become, in February 1962, Miller’s third and last wife. Unhappy with the scorn Monroe that had heaped upon him during the final phases of their marriage, the usually discreet Miller told the press, “If I’d known how we would end up, I would never have married her.”

  Marilyn’s only public comment had it that “Mr. Miller is a great writer, but it didn’t work out for us as husband and wife.” Other than that, she told reporters she was upset and didn’t wish to be “bombarded with publicity right now.”

  Miller reserved the brunt of his bitterness for future consumption. He depicted her as a crazed, tyrannical bitch-goddess in After the Fall, a poorly received play he wrote about Marilyn less than a year after her death. In Timebends, his somewhat vindictive autobiography, he said of Marilyn: “I could not place her in any world I knew—like a cork bobbing on the ocean, she could have begun her voyage on the other side of the world or a hundred yards down the beach.”

  Chapter 17

  MARILYN MONROE’S FIVE-YEAR MARRIAGE TO Arthur Miller may have lasted longer than her union with Joe DiMaggio, but it was no more successful, and in a sense, was actually far less satisfying because it ended on dire terms. There was no residual friendship, nothing further to discuss, whereas the relationship between Joe and Marilyn never really ended. “Marilyn and I are back in business,” the Yankee Clipper told Toots Shor.

  “In fact, they’d never been out of business,” said Paul Baer. “They’d been away from each other for a few years, but they were sleeping together again long before she and Miller were divorced. There was a real, long-lasting, almost unspoken intimacy between Joe and Marilyn, which is something she had with no other man.

  “Still, there was the realization on Monroe’s part that none of her three marriages had endured. Nor had she been able to have children. And then, too, she had this terrible addiction to drugs and alcohol, which to a greater or lesser extent had never been addressed by any of her psychiatrists, all of whom knew each other. They’d take her off one drug and put her on another, and this lamentable practice went on for years. It was a conspiracy of shrinks. Whenever Joe asked her about the drugs, she’d tell him she knew more about pills than any doctor, so he needn’t worry.”

  After officially reuniting in early January 1961, Joe DiMaggio gave Marilyn a gold necklace from which hung his diamond-encrusted 1951 World Series ring. She wore it at home whenever she and Joe were together. Ironically, DiMaggio’s other World Series rings were stolen from his hotel room in 1960. Marilyn’s ring was the sole survivor, until years later, when future Yankees owner George Steinbrenner gave him a replica set of the rings that had been stolen.

  On February 1, Marilyn—accompanied by Montgomery Clift—attended a New York preview of The Misfits. Arthur Miller was there with his children. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge Marilyn. After the film ended, she passed him on the way out of the theater. “Hello, Arthur,” she whispered. He gazed in her direction and gave a vague nod. The only other interaction between them took place some weeks later when Marilyn attended his mother’s funeral. She went, she told Paula Strasberg, to console Isidore Miller, Arthur’s father, with whom she remained on close terms and continued to call “Dad.”

  Whether because of her divorce from Miller, the termination of her affair with Yves Montand, the death of Clark Gable, or simply her reimmersion in the culture of barbiturates, the week that followed, much of it spent at the Strasbergs, nearly did Marilyn in. When she wasn’t with Lee and Paula, according to Lena Pepitone, she would lie in bed (i
n her darkened bedroom) in a drug-induced stupor, not eating, not sleeping, and not talking. Her daily therapy sessions with Dr. Marianne Kris provided her only excuse to climb out of bed.

  Joe DiMaggio, still with the Monette Company, had agreed to serve as a batting instructor at the New York Yankees’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. Had he been present, he surely would have prevented Marilyn from agreeing to Dr. Kris’s recommendation that she voluntarily check into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a few blocks from her apartment.

  Marilyn Monroe signed into Payne Whitney in early February, under the alias “Miss Faye Miller,” and was placed in a kind of interrogation room. For the next three hours, a procession of doctors, their arms folded in front of them, entered the room to observe Marilyn and fire off what she considered a volley of meaningless questions. She was then placed in a locked ward for the mentally ill. Once in, as Marilyn quickly learned, there was no way out.

  Although Marilyn had entered Payne Whitney of her own volition, it had been Dr. Kris who filled out the admissions papers, characterizing the patient as “potentially self-destructive, even suicidal.” Kris later claimed she had no idea the ward was locked and that Monroe couldn’t leave whenever she pleased. In any event, everything the actress brought with her, including her pocketbook and clothes, was confiscated. A nurse handed her a towel and washcloth, a baggy brown jumpsuit, and a pair of slippers. Her closet-sized room, also locked, had cement-block walls, a narrow bed with a rubber sheet, a lightweight metal chair, and a wash basin atop a small, round wooden table; a miniscule bathroom in a corner of the room contained a sink and a toilet. A pane of one-way mirror glass, cut into the room’s steel door, enabled hospital personnel to peer in on Marilyn without their being seen. The bathroom door had a built-in mirror of its own. The wails, moans, and cries of Marilyn’s fellow “inmates” could be clearly heard throughout the ward. The iron bars across the windows lent credence to what had always been Marilyn’s worst fear: that of ending up locked away and left to rot in a lunatic asylum. The question had crossed her mind a thousand times: Had she inherited the same schizophrenic blood virus that festered in her mother’s delusional brain?