The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “You Are a Very, Very Sick Girl”

  How had it come to this? Had she gone completely mad and not realized it? Was she destined to spend her last days in an asylum, just like her grandparents, and maybe her mother, too?

  Though Marilyn Monroe screamed for someone to come and release her, it was useless. Finally, she broke down into wracking sobs, as she later recalled it, feeling now more than ever that all hope was lost. Then she began to repeatedly bang her fists against the hard metal door until finally both were battered and bruised. At last, two nurses entered Marilyn’s cell, their eyes blazing. If she persisted, they warned her, she would be put into a straitjacket. They then stripped her of her clothing and forced her into a hospital gown. Their angry work done, they took their leave, but not before turning off the light, leaving their stunned patient in total blackness with her confused thoughts and desperate fears—and without her medication.

  The next day, Marilyn was told that she would be allowed out of her room if she agreed to mingle with other patients and “socialize.” She complied, knowing by now that it would be the only way she’d ever be able to obtain her freedom from the padded cell. Once in the hallway, she happened upon a young, sickly-looking woman standing in the hallway who, as she later recalled, “seemed such a pathetic and vague creature.” The patient may have viewed her visitor in the same light because she suggested that Marilyn would be much less depressed if she could talk to someone on the telephone, a friend perhaps. Marilyn agreed but said it was impossible since she was distinctly told that there were no telephones on the floor. The woman’s face registered surprise and she said, “But that’s not true. Who told you such a thing? In fact, I’ll take you to one.” She then escorted Marilyn to a pay phone, reached into her pocket and gave her a nickel. However, when Marilyn reached out to make a call, a security guard suddenly grabbed the receiver from her hand. “You can’t make any phone calls,” he told her.

  Not knowing what to do next, Marilyn headed back to her room and, as she later recalled, tried to imagine how she would handle such a situation if she were doing an improvisational sketch in one of her acting classes. After giving it some thought, she knew what she would do in that situation, which was to make the biggest noise she could make in the hope that someone new would be summoned, someone who might actually take pity on her and help her. To that end, she picked up a chair and, with everything she had left in her, hurled it against the glass on the bathroom door. It didn’t break. She picked up the chair and hurled it against the door again and again until, finally, the double-thick glass cracked. She then reached out and carefully extracted a small, sharp sliver from the cracked window. Because she had made such a racket, an entire team of doctors and nurses burst into her room. And there she sat before them on the bed, holding the jagged glass to her wrist. “If you don’t let me out of here, I’ll kill myself,” she threatened. Later, she would rationalize this horrifying moment by explaining that she was actually just playing out a scene from her movie Don’t Bother to Knock—“only [in that movie] it was with a razor blade.” It didn’t appear to the medical staff, though, that she was playacting. The staff took quick and decisive action. Two large men and two hefty women lifted the wriggling patient from the bed right into the air, kicking and screaming, until she dropped the shard of glass. They then carried her to the elevator stretched out and facedown as she fitfully sobbed the entire way, her tears leaving a small trail. Once in the elevator, they took her to another floor. There, after she calmed herself, she was commanded to take a bath, though she had taken one that morning. “Every time you change floors you have to take a bath,” she was told. Finally, after what seemed an endless time, a young doctor came in to see her.

  Through her tears, Marilyn told the intern that she had been betrayed by her psychiatrist and admitted to this mental hospital “even though I don’t belong here.” “Why are you so unhappy?” he asked her, ignoring what she had just told him. Marilyn looked at him squarely and answered, “I’ve been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out the answer to that question, and you’re asking me?”

  After speaking to Marilyn for a while longer, the doctor studied her face carefully and, as if making a profound statement, said with great authority, “You are a very, very sick girl. And you’ve been very sick for a long time.” Marilyn didn’t know how to respond to the obvious. After all, she had been hearing voices for years. She had also felt paranoid—always suspecting that someone was watching her or was after her—for just as long. It had been a secret shared by just a few, such as her first husband, Jim Dougherty; her lover and Svengali, Johnny Hyde; her acting teacher, Natasha Lytess; and, most certainly, her psychiatrists. However, her secret was out of her control now—and this doctor, a total stranger, seemed to know it.

  The doctor, his brow furrowed in concentration, continued, “You know, I don’t see how you ever could have made a movie being so depressed. How can you even act?” Marilyn was astonished by his obvious naiveté. After all, she had been doing just that for as long as she could remember, concealing her true feelings—portraying a reality very different from the one in which she existed from day to day. “Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when they worked?” she asked him. She’d recently had a conversation with her half sister, Berniece, along these same lines. She had asked Berniece if she ever became depressed. Of course, Berniece said, she had experienced the blues in the past. Marilyn wondered what she did about it if she didn’t take pills—and Berniece didn’t. Berniece told her that she prayed. That sounded like a good answer. It just never worked for Marilyn. How could Berniece, a housewife in Florida living a peaceful existence with her husband of many years, ever truly relate to Marilyn’s extraordinary problems, or to the vastness of her depression? The doctor had no answer to Marilyn’s question. So he ignored it. Instead, he jotted into his notes that, in his view, Marilyn was “extremely disturbed” and also “potentially self-destructive.” Then he left her without giving her any indication that he would ever return. That evening, she couldn’t sleep. The sounds of shrieking and wailing and moaning and sobbing echoed all night long through the hallways—anonymous voices, the mentally ill. She would never be able to forget these sounds. She would never forget this awful night. *

  On Tuesday morning, another doctor showed up in Marilyn’s cell and suggested that she spend the day with the other patients in what he referred to as “OT”—occupational therapy.

  “And do what?” Marilyn asked.

  “You could sew or play checkers,” he suggested brightly, “even cards, and maybe knit.”

  Marilyn shook her head at his pathetic presence. “The day I do any of that,” she said through gritted teeth, “will be the day you’ll really have a nut on your hands.”

  “Why is it you feel you are so different from the other patients?” he asked.

  She simply stated, “I just am.”

  “I’m Locked Up with These Poor Nutty People”

  The rest of Marilyn Monroe’s experience at Payne Whitney was more of the same—a story characterized by one indignity after another, all heaped upon a woman used to being treated with much more reverence. It felt to her as if she’d been locked away simply because no one knew quite what to do with her. Doctors and nurses would stop by her door and peer into the little square window as if she were a caged animal at the zoo. Some seemed astonished, as if they simply couldn’t believe their eyes. At one point, out of frustration, Marilyn ripped off her hospital gown and stood before them naked, just to give the sightseers “something to really look at.”

  Marilyn spent most of Wednesday begging anyone who would listen to her for a piece of paper and a pen so that she could write a note to someone, and so that her plea for release could be heard. It must have struck her that she was now in a situation eerily similar to one in which her mother, Gladys, often found herself. How many rambling manifestos had Gladys written over the years explaini
ng why she shouldn’t have been institutionalized, pleading with the disinterested to intervene on her behalf and obtain release? Finally, a young nurse agreed to allow Marilyn to make contact with someone by mail. But who? Marilyn would later recall thinking that Berniece would be too stunned to know what to do, and besides, she was out of state. She also didn’t feel close enough to any of her ex-husbands to ask for help, and besides, it would have been too humiliating. Certainly, Natasha Lytess would have come to her aid, but that bond was long broken, and besides, she was in California, too. Who? Finally, she decided to appeal to her friends Lee and Paula Strasberg. She sat down and wrote this letter to them:

  Dear Lee and Paula,

  Dr. Kris has put me in the hospital under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors. You haven’t heard from me because I’m locked up with these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I should be. I love you both.

  Marilyn

  P.S. I’m on the dangerous floor. It’s like a cell. They had my bathroom door locked and I couldn’t get their key into it, so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven’t done anything uncooperative.

  The note was delivered that same day. Lee Strasberg, when he received it, immediately called Dr. Kris. He was told that Marilyn had been suicidal and that this was the reason for her hospitalization. That was all he needed to hear to make the decision that his star student was exactly where she needed to be. Neither of the two Strasbergs would interfere with her doctor’s orders.

  On Thursday morning, once Marilyn at least acted as if she was calm, she was allowed to make one phone call. At a loss as to whom to call, she knew she would have to contact someone who would move heaven and earth to get her out of that place. Who was the most obstinate man she knew? Who would not take no for an answer? The answer was clear to her: Joe DiMaggio. Their marriage hadn’t ended well, that was true. However, based on the kind of man he was and the way he reacted when faced with defiance, she knew she would be able to count on him. So she placed the call to him in Florida.

  His friend Stacy Edwards recalled, “I believe Joe was in Florida because he used to coach the Yankees down there during training. He told me, he’s sitting in his motel room having a cold beer and watching TV when the phone rings. It’s Marilyn, sobbing that she’s in a nut house in New York and she needs him to get her out of there. He thought it was a joke. He said she was making no sense, at all, and he thought, surely, it was a prank, or she was high on pills and delusional. But then, after he calmed her down, she told him the whole story. She needed him. How she ever tracked him down in a fleabag motel in Fort Lauderdale, I’ll never know, but she needed him. That was all he needed to hear. He jumped on the next plane.”

  Joe DiMaggio showed up at Payne Whitney that very night and demanded that Marilyn Monroe be released in his custody the next morning. He said that he didn’t care who had to authorize the matter, he just expected it to be done. He was told that only Dr. Kris would be able to obtain her patient’s release. “I don’t care who does it,” Joe said brusquely, “but if someone doesn’t get her released from this place, I swear to Christ, I’ll take this hospital apart brick by brick.” He was then put on the phone with Dr. Kris, who had locked away her patient four days earlier and hadn’t come by to say hello or ask how it was going. The doctor said that if Marilyn was unhappy at the facility, perhaps she would feel more comfortable in another hospital. Joe would later say that he couldn’t believe his ears, or as he told Stacy Edwards, “I got to thinking the doctor was the one who shoulda been locked up. She was acting like Marilyn had her choice of resorts. To get what I wanted from her, I said, yeah, fine, we’ll do that. But let’s just get her out of here, first. Please.” The release was hastily arranged for the following day.

  “How Dare You Betray Me!”

  Early Friday afternoon, February 10, Ralph Roberts, Marilyn’s good friend and masseur, picked her up from a back entrance of Payne Whitney and then secreted her away, with Dr. Kris in the backseat. In the car on the way back to Marilyn’s apartment, she let Dr. Kris have it. “How dare you betray me!” she shouted at her. “I trusted you. How could you do that to me? And you didn’t even visit me? What is wrong with you?” Roberts recalled, “Marilyn was screaming at the doctor as only she could. She was like a hurricane unleashed. I don’t think Dr. Kris had ever seen her like that, and she was frightened and very shaken by the violence of Marilyn’s response.

  “We dropped Marilyn off, and I wound up driving the doctor home. There was a lot of traffic, so we inched down the West Side Highway overlooking the river, and Dr. Kris was trembling and kept repeating over and over, ‘I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.’ ”

  Some people question Roberts’s recollection of Marilyn’s release. As a close friend of Marilyn’s, he may have had a vested interest in portraying the psychiatrist as remorseful. He may have known that Marilyn would have wanted this short bit of her history minimized. If Dr. Kris admitted to doing something terrible, then perhaps Roberts could believe Marilyn had been of sound mind the entire time and shouldn’t have been hospitalized at all. In any case, this is how Roberts recollected it, and therefore many people have chosen to view the Payne Whitney chapter in Marilyn’s life as just a tremendous mix-up, or a misdiagnosis from an incompetent doctor.

  “Once Joe got Marilyn situated in her apartment, he realized that perhaps Marilyn’s shrink may have had the right idea—just the wrong way of going about it,” said Stacy Edwards. “Marilyn wasn’t well. She was crying and disoriented. Without her pills for those few days, her entire system was out of whack. He also could not believe how thin she’d gotten. After calming her down, he convinced her to allow him to take her to another hospital, Columbia University– Presbyterian. She said she would go but he had to promise her that he would not leave town and would come to visit her every day she was in there. He agreed to that.”

  At about five ’o clock that afternoon, Marilyn was admitted to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia University–Presbyterian Hospital, where she would remain for more than three weeks, until March 5. The first thing she did, once settled into her new hospital room, was to contact her attorney, Aaron Frosch. She demanded that he draft a document that would prevent any one person from ever having the power to commit her again without first consulting Joe DiMaggio.

  When she was finally released from the second hospital, Marilyn was descended upon by such an excited mob of reporters and photographers that the scene became riotous. What was perhaps the most revealing element of such chaos, though, was how much she seemed to relish it. Except for a few occasions in the past, such as when she announced her divorce from Joe, Marilyn generally lit up whenever the media was present. She loved the public’s rapt attention, even if her private life was falling apart. Moreover, she knew what her job as a movie star entailed, which was to look and act like Marilyn Monroe, even when she didn’t much feel like her. No matter the present travail, she usually managed to play the part. In fact, by this time—1961—it had become second nature to her.

  When she got home, though, Marilyn was in for a shock. First of all, she got a telephone call from Doc Goddard, Grace’s husband. She hadn’t heard from the man in many years. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had talked to him. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he said that he was tired of reading in the press that it had been Grace’s idea that Marilyn marry James Dougherty. He was going to write a book, he said, tell the truth—which, he said, was that Marilyn had been the aggressor in that relationship, and in fact had asked Grace’s help in convincing Dougherty to marry her. He was tired, he said, of being blamed for that first marriage since it was due to his job transfer that the Goddards had to leave Norma Jeane behind. Marilyn truly didn’t know what his angle was, but she didn’t like it. She told him that if he wrote a book about her, she would sue him. She also told
him that Grace would be very disappointed to hear that he was planning such a venture. The conversation ended in an unpleasant way with Marilyn hanging up on him.

  Gladys’s Sheets, Soaked with Blood

  The very week that Marilyn Monroe was suffering through her experiences at Payne Whitney in New York, her mother was having similar problems in the Rock Haven Sanitarium in California.

  Gladys Baker Eley, who was now sixty, had by this time been officially diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. It had been clear for many years that this was the case with her. She was extremely unhappy at Rock Haven; indeed she had never been happy at any sanitarium over the years. No one at Rock Haven seemed to believe in or understand Christian Science, which was something Gladys simply could not accept. She was as devout about the religion as ever, sending pamphlets and brochures about it to everyone she knew on a weekly basis, including her daughters, Marilyn and Berniece. Now, with her mental illness affecting her intensely, she’d become firmly convinced that the doctors at Rock Haven had been poisoning her food. She wrote to her daughters that she needed to be released very soon or, as she noted to Berniece, “I will most certainly die in here from all of the poison.” She also believed she was being sprayed with insecticides while she slept. Moreover, because of her faith, she steadfastly refused to take medications that had been prescribed to control her schizophrenia. Therefore, there was no relief for her; her mental state worsened with each passing day.