Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  “Our first stop in Mexico City was a Catholic orphanage,” recalled Sydney Guilaroff. “Marilyn had brought along all sorts of gifts for the kids: clothes, toys, candy bars, the works. They loved her for it. These children were among the poorest of the poor. And Marilyn, of course, understood their hopelessness, what it meant to be locked away in an orphanage. She filled out papers to be able to adopt one or more of the orphans.

  In Mexico City, the group stayed at the Continental Hotel, where they were greeted each morning by hundreds of fans chanting “Maraleen! Maraleen!” A pair of security guards had been hired to protect the actress. Pat Newcomb arranged a press conference for her in the hotel’s grand ballroom. Two days into the trip, Marilyn and her entourage visited the Byrna Gallery, where Monroe bought three paintings by prominent Mexican artists. At a fine-arts shop, she ordered glass and metal sconces for the light fixtures, a silver-framed mirror for the dining room, and two large rectangular mirrors for her bedroom. She acquired a hand-carved chess set and ordered several art deco chairs. “She also bought clothing and jewelry,” said Sydney Guilaroff, “but instead of placing the jewelry in her hotel room safe, she wrapped it in tissue paper and kept the packet in a pair of her shoes. There had been several recent robberies in the hotel, and I guess Marilyn figured her jewelry would be more secure in a shoe than in a safe.”

  Marilyn traveled around Mexico with Fred Vanderbilt Field, a disinherited member of the prominent American family and a longtime associate of the Greensons, whose pro-Marxist and Communist leanings made Field a major FBI target. He and his wife, Nieves, took Marilyn on a tour of Mexico, driving her to Cuernavaca, Taxco, and Borda. The actress’s brief association with Field led to a flurry of FBI reports, one of which (sent by an official of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division) clearly demonstrated that Eunice Murray had become a bureau informant. “According to Eunice Murray,” read an FBI memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, dated March 2, 1962, “the subject (Marilyn Monroe) still reflects the political views of Arthur Miller. Her views are very positively and concisely leftist. However, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.”

  And then there was José Bolaños, the thirty-five-year old actor/screenwriter/film producer from Mexico City, who spotted Monroe in a restaurant and sent a dozen roses to her table. Dark, intense, masculine, and moody, Bolaños had once been a matador, a bullfighter. Passionate and romantic, he was, Monroe told Lena Pepitone, “the greatest lover in the world.” The only problem was his jealousy. “He’s worse than Joe,” she said, referring to the DiMaggio of old.

  Bolaños and Monroe spent a night in Acapulco. The next day, he took her into the dense forests on the outskirts of the city to the Pancho Villa House, a shrine to the famous Mexican Robin Hood who lived at the turn of the century. A hero to some, a villain to others, Pancho Villa remained a mythic figure whose army of lovers—females of all ages—had purportedly numbered in the thousands. Visitors to the shrine paid $25 each to watch women lie on a bed and make love to the spirit of Pancho Villa. They would go through all the motions of lovemaking. They would writhe, thrash, moan, groan, tremble, and gyrate, while the paying spectators watched in stunned silence. They would call out Pancho’s name as they reached climax. It didn’t occur to Marilyn until she’d returned to the States that Pancho Villa’s “lovers” were nothing more than a bunch of performers being paid to put on an exhibition. And that the so-called Acapulco shrine to Pancho was only one of many scattered around Mexico and run by a band of enterprising operators.

  When Marilyn’s eleven-day Mexican sojourn ended, she returned to Los Angeles via New York. She told Lena Pepitone that José Bolaños had proposed to her. On March 5 Bolanos joined Marilyn in Hollywood and accompanied her to the annual Golden Globe Awards. Once again the Hollywood Foreign Press Association found a reason to give Marilyn a statuette, this time naming her the World’s Favorite Female Star. It wasn’t an Oscar, but it would have to do. The Hollywood Reporter noted that her acceptance speech was slurred, suggesting she’d downed too many pills or too much booze—or both. Joe DiMaggio, in New York, read about José Bolaños and hopped the next plane for Los Angeles. By the time he arrived, Bolaños was on his way back to Mexico. Marilyn had checked him into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then, in his words, “she never came back.” Without funds to pay for his lodging, Bolaños had no choice but to check out.

  • • •

  With Joe DiMaggio’s newfound acceptance of psychotherapy, he’d taken steps to forge a peaceful relationship with Dr. Ralph Greenson. But when Joe arrived in Los Angeles in early March, an event transpired that affected both his attitude and his budding friendship with the therapist. Opposed to Marilyn’s fleeting romance with José Bolaños, Greenson suggested that she stay at his house until the screenwriter left town. Having brought over a toothbrush and little else, she was still there when DiMaggio showed up to drive her home. Greenson told DiMaggio that he’d sedated Monroe and that she was asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He said it would be best if she remained in his home until further notice. Evidently awake, Marilyn heard DiMaggio’s voice and began yelling his name. The ballplayer bolted past Greenson, ran up the stairs, found Marilyn, and brought her back downstairs. She complained that Greenson had forced her to stay against her will, that she’d planned on spending a single night but that he hadn’t permitted her to leave. Joe ushered her out of the house and into his car, and they drove off. Marilyn told Joe that not only had Greenson imprisoned her, he’d also encouraged her to break off many of her personal ties, DiMaggio included.

  By the time DiMaggio left Los Angeles, having helped Marilyn move some of her new furniture into her Brentwood house, he’d come to thoroughly distrust her psychiatrist. “Even Marilyn began to wonder about Greenson,” recalled Joe DiMaggio Jr. “She told me as early as mid-March that she planned to make one more picture and then move back to New York. She’d finally come to share my father’s opinion regarding Hollywood—he called it ‘a cesspool,’ and she termed it ‘the first circle of hell.’ ”

  Ongoing surveillance of Monroe by both the Secret Service and the FBI revealed that on March 24, 1962, Monroe and John F. Kennedy spent the night together at Bing Crosby’s Palm Desert residence. A photograph of them, located in the FBI files, shows JFK attired in a turtleneck sweater and slacks, while Marilyn has on only a white terry cloth bathrobe. Peter Lawford originally asked Frank Sinatra to host Marilyn and the president at his Palm Springs home. In anticipation of their arrival, Sinatra had spent some $500,000 transforming his estate into the West Coast White House, constructing a series of bungalows for the Secret Service and a heliport to accommodate the executive chopper that would be used to transport Kennedy from the Palm Springs airport to the property.

  “A month before the visit,” said Peter Lawford, “J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that the FBI had been made aware of Frank Sinatra’s ongoing dealings with leading Mob figures, such as Sam Giancana. I received a phone call from Bobby informing me that they’d decided to have the president stay at Bing Crosby’s house rather than Sinatra’s. Bobby asked me to pass on this information to Sinatra, which I did. From that day forward Sinatra was persona non grata at the Kennedy White House. He blamed me for what happened, and it ended our friendship. He was furious. He got hold of a jackhammer and tore up the heliport outside his property. His last words to me were, ‘Why would he stay at Crosby’s place? Crosby’s a fucking Republican.’ ”

  • • •

  Despite his growing animosity toward Marilyn’s psychiatrist, the month of April turned out relatively well for Joe DiMaggio. He spent several days with Marilyn at her Brentwood house, met with his son one weekend in San Francisco, was paid handsomely to appear at a baseball memorabilia show in Boston, and was invited to lunch at the United Nations with UN Undersecretary General Ralph Bunche. Although the working press had to provide UN security guards with proper identif
ication, when DiMaggio reached the dining room entrance, the guards instantly recognized him. “Come on in, Joe,” said one of them, “Dr. Bunche is waiting for you.”

  The same month proved to be much more problematic for Monroe. In April she attended costume and makeup tests for Something’s Got to Give. A remake of My Favorite Wife, a 1940 comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, the never-to-be-completed Something’s Got to Give was about a shipwrecked woman, thought to be deceased, who returns home after several years only to learn that her husband has remarried.

  The ill-fated project was doomed from the start. One of the major problems was that Twentieth Century–Fox began shooting long before having a completed and approved script in hand. The other major problem was Marilyn Monroe herself. “Her chief gripe,” reported Whitey Snyder, “was that Fox had given Elizabeth Taylor a million dollars to star in Cleopatra, whereas she was being paid one-tenth that amount. She said she should never have disbanded Marilyn Monroe Productions or gotten rid of Milton Greene, and she blamed it all on Arthur Miller. From the beginning, Marilyn had it out for Fox’s bosses, all of whom she contended were corrupt. As usual, she was constantly late on the set, arrived high and hung over and unable to recall her lines. To complicate matters, Dr. Ralph Greenson had convinced Fox to hire him in a sort of supervisory capacity to keep Marilyn going. He felt she needed the picture for her own self-esteem. In my opinion, he should never have been directly involved with the project. There seemed to be something strange and phony about Greenson’s relationship with Marilyn.”

  Shortly after production on the film began, Marilyn received an unexpected and highly disturbing note from C. Stanley Gifford, the man she believed to be her birth father. Claiming that he wished to “make amends” for his refusal in the past to acknowledge or meet Monroe, Gifford’s brief letter wished her luck on her latest film venture and ended with the words: “From the man you tried to see some ten years ago. God forgive me.”

  Upon receipt of the card, Marilyn contacted Lotte Goslar and read it to her. “She was in tears,” Goslar recalled, “and she kept saying, ‘It’s too late, much too late.’ ”

  A week later, according to Goslar, Marilyn received a telephone call at Fox from a woman in Palm Springs who claimed to be Stanley Gifford’s private nurse. Gifford had suffered a heart attack and wasn’t expected to survive. That’s the reason he’d sent her the note. He wanted to talk to her before he died. Monroe responded by telling the nurse exactly what she’d been told ten years earlier when she’d approached Gifford: “Please assure the gentleman I have never met him, but if he has anything specific to say to me, he can contact my lawyer. Would you like his number?”

  That was the last Marilyn heard from Gifford, and vice versa. As it turned out, Gifford survived his heart attack and outlived his daughter. Their interaction during the filming of Something’s Got to Give brought to an abrupt halt Marilyn’s lifelong search for her real father. It likewise, no doubt, contributed to Marilyn’s mounting slag heap of personal problems, earmarked most profoundly by her addictions and difficulties in front of the cameras. Director George Cukor lashed out at Pat Newcomb one day for bringing a bottle of champagne onto the set. “Stop acting like a fucking social director,” he yelled, “and start acting like a publicist!” Following a series of arguments with Monroe, who constantly complained that the script kept changing, Cukor sent Darryl Zanuck a memo expressing his disdain for Monroe and her lack of consideration for the cast and crew: “Marilyn is the least professional performer I have ever worked with.” To which Zanuck replied: “If I could, I would launch a torpedo from here—aimed directly at her dressing room.” Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sent Henry Weinstein, producer of the picture, a letter complaining that Marilyn Monroe “represents everything that’s wrong with Hollywood. She’s spoiled silly and drugged out of her mind. I saw some footage yesterday, and she seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if in a trance. It’s difficult to watch.”

  The situation grew progressively worse. Three weeks into production, Marilyn came down with a viral infection and refused to go to work. Peter Levathes, acting head of the studio, dropped in on Monroe at her Brentwood house. He thought she looked and sounded fine. He made an appointment with Mickey Rudin, her attorney, and pointed out that Marilyn had certain contractual obligations, which she wasn’t meeting. He told Rudin, “All I ever hear, every single day, is, she’s not feeling well, she has a cold, she has a virus, she’s under the weather. The point is, she’s never on the set, and on those rare occasions when she’s around and in front of the cameras, she either massacres her lines or forgets them altogether.” Rudin communicated with Ralph Greenson, noting that Levathes had threatened to terminate Marilyn and shut down the production. The psychiatrist “guaranteed” that Marilyn would show up punctually every day and would apologize to the director and producer for her absences. Although Greenson had come to disapprove of Joe DiMaggio’s presence in his ex-wife’s life, he turned to the ballplayer in an effort to convince Marilyn to resume work on the project. Reluctant to become involved with Twentieth Century–Fox, DiMaggio nevertheless spent two days with her in Brentwood, attempting to raise her spirits.

  It was at this stage, following DiMaggio’s departure, that Marilyn surprised both Greenson and Cukor by vanishing from Los Angeles and flying to New York for three days on what she termed “a top-secret” mission. The mission entailed singing the “Happy Birthday Song” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday.

  It had been Peter Lawford’s idea to have Marilyn Monroe sing for the finale of the president’s birthday gala, a Democratic Party fund-raiser held before eighteen thousand paying supporters and a television audience numbering in the millions. In Monroe’s absence, shooting on Something’s Got to Give once again ground to a halt. As Marilyn and Peter Lawford flew to New York, Bobby Kennedy telephoned Milton Gould, the chairman of Fox’s executive committee, and requested that the studio release Marilyn for several days so she could participate in the festivities. Unaware that Monroe had already departed, Gould said it would be impossible—the film was way behind schedule. Recalling the conversation, Gould noted that RFK called him “a no-good Jew bastard” and hung up on him.

  Marilyn had asked fashion designer Jean Louis to create her dress for the occasion. At a cost of $7,000, the couturier had fashioned a skintight, flesh-colored mesh gown studded with rhinestones. Wearing nothing underneath, Marilyn described the garment as “all skin and beads.” “The skin was visible,” commented Peter Lawford, “but the beads were not.” Marilyn personally paid the bill for the gown but was later reimbursed by Bobby Kennedy, who evidently wrote it off as a “Justice Department expense.”

  Another payment assumed by RFK went to Mickey Song, a Beverly Hills hair stylist who attended to JFK and RFK whenever one or both visited the West Coast. Song had been flown to New York to cut President Kennedy’s hair prior to the Madison Square Garden birthday party. “I saw Marilyn Monroe sitting alone in her Garden dressing room and noticed that while her hair had been preset, it had to be brushed out,” said Song. “I asked Bobby Kennedy, whose hair I also cut earlier that day, if Marilyn needed me to attend to her hair. He led me to her and introduced us, though I’d met her previously on several occasions at Hollywood parties. She seemed nervous as I worked on her hair. A few minutes later Bobby returned and said he needed to talk with Marilyn, so I left the room. The next thing I knew, he came barging out of her dressing room and slammed the door behind him. ‘I think she needs you again,’ he said. And under his breath, he muttered, ‘What a bitch!’ I went back in. Her hair was totally disheveled. She didn’t say anything as I combed it back into place, but it seemed apparent to me that he’d tried to put the make on her and she fought him off. For my bouffant job on Marilyn, Bobby eventually sent me a check for fifty dollars.”

  Mickey Song further remembered that Marilyn was drinking heavily, alternating between champagne
and vodka, as she waited for her cue. Among the celebrities in the packed house that night were Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, and Ella Fitzgerald. Peter Lawford introduced her. Her gown glittering, she moved slowly in the direction of the spotlight, stopped, looked straight at the president and began to sing her seductive, unmistakably sexual rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Ethel Kennedy had joined Bobby in the audience, but Jackie passed the evening at her retreat near Middleburg, Virginia, evidently uninterested in hearing her husband serenaded by the woman who secretly planned to evict her from the White House.

  After completing the number, Marilyn launched into a specially written version of “Thanks for the Memory,” and then led the audience in a happy birthday chorus. A large cake was wheeled out, and the president soon appeared onstage to cut it. “I can now retire from politics,” he joked to the crowd, “having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

  With the show over, the party adjourned only long enough for a few of the more notable participants to relocate to a private affair hosted by Arthur Krim, head of United Artists. Still wearing her nearly diaphanous gown, Marilyn was as much a hit in Krim’s town house as she’d been at the Garden. Although the actress had rejected Bobby Kennedy’s advances earlier that evening, he hadn’t given up. UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson would recall in his autobiography that in order to converse with Marilyn that evening, he’d been “forced to break through the strong defense established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.”