The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The hospital staff let Marilyn and Norman enter Johnny’s room, where his body was still on a bed covered by a white sheet. Marilyn, seeming stricken, her eyes dark and shadowed in pain, walked on shaky legs to the bed and very slowly pulled the sheet down to Johnny’s shoulders. Johnny had once told her that if he were to die, all she would have to do would be to hold him in her arms and he would spring back to life, just for her. Gazing down at his dead body, tears of regret and sorrow spilled onto his face as she cried out, “Johnny, I did love you. Please know that I did love you.”

  Suicide over Johnny?

  Johnny Hyde’s funeral was extremely difficult; his estranged wife refused to allow Marilyn Monroe to attend it. “They thought I was awful,” Marilyn later recalled. It’s been said that Marilyn and Natasha Lytess disguised themselves as family servants and managed to get into the service anyway, which was held at Johnny’s North Palm Drive house. Elia Kazan’s yarn was that Marilyn broke into the house the night before the service and kept vigil till morning beside Johnny’s coffin. Later there were published accounts that the next day at the funeral, she hurled herself onto the coffin and had to be pulled off it, kicking and screaming in agonizing grief. That story was started by Marilyn, in her own book: “I threw myself on the coffin and sobbed. I wished I was dead with him.” No one remembers anything like this happening at the funeral. Rather, Marilyn was apparently subdued and contemplative throughout the burial service at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

  Afterward, Marilyn stayed at Johnny’s grave site for many hours, alone with her thoughts and memories. She stayed so long, in fact, that the sun was setting and an attendant suggested that she take her leave. According to veteran Hollywood agent Norman Winters, that anecdote is actually true.

  She hadn’t been in love with Johnny; she was clear about it. It was just a simple matter of chemistry. She hadn’t wanted to lead him on, but didn’t know how to keep him in her life—indeed, in her career—without having sex with him, which, she later admitted, “was, I guess, the same as leading him on.” However, they had shared so many intimate moments, she felt certain that no one knew him quite as well as she did. “No one knows the true depth of what we shared,” she would later tell one of her closest friends. “When it’s just the two of you in bed in each other’s arms and it’s pitch black in the room and you put your head on his chest and hear his heart beat, that’s when you really know a man. When his heart beats for you, that’s when you really know him.”

  “If I had never met him, he would be alive with his family,” a distraught Marilyn told Natasha, according to Natasha’s memory. “And now I’m alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” Natasha told her, hugging her tightly. “I’m with you, Marilyn. I’m with you.”

  “I had to keep telling her ‘you’re not alone,’ ” Natasha would later recall, “because I truly believed she was about to end her life.”

  “I hadn’t seen her in some time,” said her neighbor Jerry Eidelman, “and I ran into her in—of all places—the grocery store. It had to have been just a day or so after the funeral. She was buying cleaning supplies. I remember that she had on yellow slacks and a white-and-yellow angora sweater, her hair in a ponytail and horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you cleaning the house?’ I asked her. She forced sort of a thin smile and said, ‘No, I don’t clean, Jerry. We have someone else do the cleaning. But for her to shop for the supplies would cost more money, so I’m doing it.’ Then she said, ‘I need to stay busy. Did you hear about Johnny Hyde?’ I told her I did. She said, ‘It’s so awful. I don’t know how to cope with it. And then this thing with my mother, too, is driving me crazy.’ I asked what she was talking about, and she said that her mother had gone off and married some creep and that she was worried sick about her. She said she was thinking of going on a trip to try to find the woman and rescue her from her husband. I said, ‘But Marilyn, you can’t do that. Or at least not alone. Take me with you. We’ll find her together.’ She said, ‘I don’t think I can expose you or anyone else to my mother. You don’t know what she has put me and my sister through. She’s very ill.’ Then, in what I now view as one of those great Marilyn Monroe moments, she put her hand up to her forehead dramatically, swooned a little, and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, I simply must go now.’ She then rushed out, leaving her cart of cleaning supplies behind.

  “I paid for the stuff and took it to her home. I knocked on the door and she answered. She looked awful. She’d been crying and was very pale. ‘Here are your cleaning supplies,’ I told her. ‘You forgot them.’ She looked at me blankly and asked, ‘What cleaning supplies?’ I said, ‘Thirty minutes ago, Marilyn—at the grocery store, remember?’ She was very disoriented. ‘Oh, that’s right, the cleaning supplies,’ she said. She then took the bag from me, and without saying thank you or anything else, just turned and closed the door behind her. It was very strange and, also, very disconcerting.”

  A couple of days after Johnny’s funeral, Natasha returned home from work at the studio and found Marilyn in her bedroom. She was out cold, her cheeks puffed out and her coloring pale. Horrified, Natasha rushed to her side and forced open her mouth. It was full of dissolving pills. Natasha managed to shake Marilyn awake. By way of explanation, Marilyn told her she had taken some sleeping pills—which she had bought over the counter at Schwab’s—and then fell asleep before she could wash them down. It seemed such an unlikely scenario, Natasha didn’t really believe it. “She felt worthless,” Natasha later remembered. “She thought she was responsible for Hyde’s heart attack. If he had not loved her and cared so much about her [she thought] he would still be alive.”

  No, Marilyn insisted, she had not tried to kill herself over Johnny Hyde. She would never do such a thing. She later told photographer and friend Milton Greene, “I felt guilty and I had a lot of feelings to sort through—but, oh baby, I sure didn’t want to die. The fact is,” she concluded, sadly, “he had made certain that I had nothing to die for.”

  Natasha wasn’t convinced. She wrote a letter to her student Helena Albert at this time in which she said she felt that Marilyn “was intent on doing herself in” and that she feared there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it. “I think that when a person wants to kill herself, she will at some point do it despite the best intentions of her friends to prevent it from happening,” she wrote. She also wrote that she was determined to be loyal to Marilyn and do whatever she could to “keep her stabilized and,” she added, somewhat wryly, “if there is any time for it, perhaps we will be able to work on her acting, as well.”

  Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, Marilyn Monroe presented Natasha Lytess with an antique ivory cameo brooch framed in gold. On it, she had inscribed, “I just want you to know that I owe you much more than my life.”

  Marilyn Tries to Meet Her “Father”

  When Johnny Hyde died, Marilyn felt that she’d lost not only one of her greatest allies, but also the closest thing she had to a father figure. She turned to Natasha Lytess to get through this difficult time. Natasha was supportive, of course, but she believed that Johnny’s death could indirectly have a troubling effect on Marilyn’s career. Natasha had been working with Marilyn on “deepening” her performances. She now saw that she had such great potential and wanted to make certain that she didn’t fall back to the mostly hollow portrayals she had been doing in her earlier films. “I think tragic roles are her forte,” she would later observe. “There is a strangeness about her… an un-real quality.”

  Though she wasn’t exactly a fan of Johnny Hyde’s, Natasha couldn’t help but believe that Marilyn’s association with him had had a positive effect on her acting. After her most recent performances, she felt certain that Marilyn was on the brink of a major breakthrough. She had seen a maturation of Marilyn as both a woman and an actress. Natasha thought that Johnny believed in Marilyn so much, it encouraged her to finally believe in herself—and thus she saw the benefits not only in her acting but in her day-to-day life. With Johnny gon
e, Natasha felt that they needed somehow to find another person to fill that role in Marilyn’s life. Was it possible that her real father might do so? Natasha felt it was worth a try.

  In Marilyn Monroe’s life, there was no question in her mind about her paternity. She simply knew that Charles Gifford was her father—just as Gladys had known so many years earlier. Since this was before medical confirmation of paternity was even a viable option, there probably had been no way for Marilyn to know absolutely—yet she said she absolutely knew in her heart. When Natasha approached Marilyn about tracking down her father, saying that they should have a face-to-face encounter with him, Marilyn was agreeable.

  Marilyn spent a few days doing an investigation into just what happened to her father after he left Los Angeles. It turned out he didn’t go far. Gifford had moved to Northern California. After working as a contractor responsible for the building of chalets for a private resort, he went into poultry farming. He married again, to a woman who died soon after the wedding. Finally, he established the Red Rock Dairy, a five-acre farm in Hemet, where he remarried. While Marilyn had no problem finding Gifford’s home address, she couldn’t find a current phone number for him—though word had definitely begun to spread through Hemet that she was trying to find one. Apparently she decided that she would take a risk and drive to Hemet, hoping that maybe an element of surprise would work in her favor.

  Susan Reimer, who was eight years old at the time, recalled that her family was excited that a celebrity was coming to visit their “Uncle Stan.” When she asked her mother, Dolly, who was coming, the older woman put a finger up to her mouth and said, “Shhh. We’re not supposed to tell a soul. But it’s”—dramatic pause—“Marilyn Monroe.” Reimer recalled, “That’s when I learned about the family’s secret, one that was never discussed openly and only whispered about. Uncle Stan was Marilyn Monroe’s father. I was told to keep my mouth shut about it, and I did for many years.” She says that when she confronted her uncle and asked him directly about his link to Marilyn Monroe, he balked and said that he didn’t want to reveal anything that would hurt his wife.

  Charles Stanley Gifford Jr. today says, “People have been trying to connect these dots back to my family for decades. It’s not true. My father would have told me if he was Marilyn Monroe’s father, too. He just would have. The press pestered him and my poor stepmother, Mary, to death because of these stories Marilyn made up. The poor woman had nothing to do with it, and yet never had a moment’s peace in her life because of it.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Marilyn, armed only with Gifford’s address, prepared to depart, assuming that Natasha would be joining her on the drive. However, Lytess seemed to think that Marilyn needed to face that powerful moment on her own. Susan Martinson, who was eighteen in 1950 and a student and friend of Lytess’s, recalled, “Natasha told me that Marilyn cornered her and said, ‘Please come with me. I don’t want to drive up there alone. He’s already hung up on me once and I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle it if he rejects me again.’ Natasha tried to talk her way out of it, but Marilyn insisted.”

  Marilyn and Natasha drove several hours to Charles Gifford’s home. When they finally arrived, Marilyn reached into the backseat and fished through her purse. There she found a recent magazine that featured her on the cover. She took a deep breath, then exited the car. Did she really believe that this man could be unaware of who she was—that she needed proof that she was “somebody” to convince him she was worthy of a chance to plead her case? Possibly. She rang the doorbell, then waited, the magazine in her hand rolled into a tube.

  The door opened.

  Marilyn lifted her lowered head to find—a woman. Apparently, it was Mary Gifford, Charles Stanley Gifford’s present wife. Marilyn’s conversation with her was brief. All that came of it was a business card with Gifford’s lawyer’s number on it, and an awful memory of another broken dream. Gifford’s son, Charles Stanley Jr., insists today that “my father would never have given Marilyn a business card.” In a letter to her former student Helena Albert, Natasha was very clear that she and Marilyn definitely had made the trip, though. She wrote that it had been her idea and that “I regret now putting Marilyn through it because I think it did her no good.” She also wrote that during the long drive she and Marilyn discussed “her father issues,” and that Natasha had decided before they even got to Hemet that “we were making a mistake in not bringing a psychiatrist with us. I don’t know what I was thinking!”

  In 1962, Charles Stanley Gifford was diagnosed with cancer shortly before Marilyn Monroe’s death. At that time, he supposedly tried to contact Marilyn from a California hospital. According to Monroe’s friend, actor and masseur Ralph Roberts, a nurse telephoned Marilyn and said, “Your father is very ill and may die. His dying wish is to see you.” To that, Marilyn was alleged to have said, “Tell the gentleman to contact my lawyer.” Again, his son doesn’t believe it. “Absolutely not. If you knew my father, you would know how ridiculous that is. It is not true.”

  Charles Stanley Gifford would die of cancer in 1965. Before his death, he supposedly confided to his Presbyterian minister, Dr. Donald Liden, that he had recently spoken to Marilyn on the telephone—impossible, of course, since she would have passed away three years earlier. When Dr. Liden questioned Gifford about it, he confessed. “My daughter was Marilyn Monroe,” he said. Dr. Liden recalled, “My jaw dropped. But I didn’t doubt the truth of it. He said that he felt the mother [Gladys] had been unfair. She had cut him off and didn’t allow him to see the child. When he married again, it got difficult. His wife was a fine woman and he didn’t want to hurt her by acknowledging he’d had a child out of wedlock. I detected it was a sorrowful thing for him.”

  “I was with my father every day when he was sick,” insists his son, Charles Jr. “There was no deathbed confession to me, I can tell you that much. We were very close. He told me the particulars of where he wanted to be buried, how he felt about his life, his children. If ever there would have been a time for a deathbed confession, it would have been on his deathbed!

  “My father and his friend Ray Guthrie lived together at the time he was dating Gladys,” Gifford Jr. continues. “I once called Ray and asked him about this time. He said, ‘Yeah, I remember Gladys. She used to come around and cook breakfast for us and we’d go out and do this and that, just have fun, nothing serious.’ I asked, ‘Well did Dad ever say anything to you about fathering a child by her?’ He just laughed and said, ‘No, but if he had, he sure would have mentioned it.’

  “My father’s DNA is on record at Riverside Hospital,” he concludes. “If Marilyn Monroe’s DNA is on record at one of the hospitals she was ever in, I challenge someone to do a test and compare them, and you’ll find that Charles Stanley Gifford is not her father—and I am not her half brother.”

  Early Films

  The films featuring Marilyn Monroe in 1950 and 1951 were not exactly memorable. As Young as You Feel found her back at 20th Century-Fox, and despite her sixth-place billing and her prominent display on the posters and lobby cards, she had but two brief scenes as Harriet, a secretary. Then there was Love Nest, a post–World War II sex comedy without the sex, starring June Haver and William Lundigan. Marilyn’s role was described in a review as “an extended cameo,” the highlight being a scene in which she emerges from a shower, draped in a towel. There was also Let’s Make It Legal, with things only slightly better for Marilyn as regards her screen time, which is mostly spent in a bathing suit. Claudette Colbert and Macdonald Carey star in this romantic comedy “that feels overstretched even at an hour and a quarter,” in one critic’s appraisal.

  In March 1951, the deal Johnny Hyde had been working on for Marilyn to re-sign with Fox was finally finished, without him. The William Morris Agency, Johnny’s firm, wasn’t interested in Marilyn after his death, so she ended up with the Famous Artists Agency, where she would be managed for the next several years by a man named Hugh French. The Fox deal was for forty weeks and $500 a week wh
ether she worked or not—and she couldn’t work for anyone else either, unless the company loaned her out. At the end of each year, the studio could decide not to renew, and if so, she would be on her own once again. However, Fox could also renew at the end of the term, and if it did she would receive $750 a week for the second year, $1,250 for the third, $1,500 for the fourth, $2,000 for the fifth, $2,500 for the sixth, and $3,500 for the seventh, if she lasted that long. It’s interesting that she would now be working for Darryl Zanuck again, a man who clearly had no love for her. He only signed her because Joe Schenck, Johnny Hyde, and so many others kept pressuring him about it. Natasha Lytess also went with Marilyn as part of the deal, and would be getting $750 a week to coach Marilyn—$500 from Fox and $250 from Marilyn. So Marilyn was paying Natasha 50 percent of what Fox paid her that first year, which certainly showed how much value she placed on her work with the acting teacher. Natasha was making quite a bit more money that first year than Marilyn herself.

  Another of her early films was Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (made in 1951, though released in 1952), adapted for the screen from an unsuccessful Broadway play by Clifford Odets, who, with the play’s director, Lee Strasberg, and others, had founded the controversial, left-leaning Group Theatre in the 1930s. The play starred Tallulah Bankhead as Mae Doyle, a part assumed by Barbara Stanwyck in the film. Despite her prominent billing, Marilyn’s role was minor. Still, she received excellent notices, among them these words of praise by Alton Cook in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: “The girl has a refreshing exuberance, an abundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too.… She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star.… Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” If Fox’s loaning out of its contract player to RKO was meant to test the waters as to her box-office potential, as has been speculated, the studio got its answer. Thus reassured, Fox set about finding scripts to showcase her obvious charms, pairing her with more established leading men.